The Jewish hand behind Internet
Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MySpace, eBay…
[Due to the popularity of this document we have since done some important
additions of images, links, text, the latter indicated by this blue color]
Sections
- Wikipedia
- Yahoo!
- MySpace
- eBay
- Israeli guru Yossi Vardi
- Other actors – some Jewish articles boasting of their influence
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Google
(which in 2006 acquired Youtube)
Founders Brin and Page are Jewish
The Jewish site SomethingJewish.co.uk writes in a review by Marcus J. Freed of the book “Richistan”, 05/09/2007 on “the Jewish boys from Google”:
The global economy is vastly different to 40 years ago and today’s new billionaires include the Jewish boys from Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, along with thousands of other ‘instapreneurs’.
Larry Page – who shares the title of Google President even has an Israeli family connection.
B´nai B´rith Magazine, paper of one of the mightiest Jewish organizations, writes in their article “The Searchmasters”, spring 2006, on “…Larry Page, whose mother Gloria is Jewish”. The Magazine continues:
Larry’s maternal grandfather, however, followed a much different path. He was an early settler in Israel, making aliyah in the spartan desert town of Arad.
Sergei Brin and Larry Page –“the Jewish boys from Google”
The Jewish entourage in Google
The Jew Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The Jewish woman Susan Wojcicki was the one who gave Google office space to start the business. Susan Wojcicki has since become Vice President of Product Management at Google.
This while here likewise Jewish younger sister Anne Wojcicki, a biotechnology specialist, in May 2007 during “a traditional Jewish wedding” ceremony (according to Israeli paper Ha´aretz, May 29, 2008) married the Google President Sergey Brin. Keeping everything neatly within the tribe.
SomethingJewish.co.uk writes 24/05/2007:
Jewgle wedding
By: Leslie BunderThe world’s wealthiest Jewish bachelor is no more. Sergey Brin, co-founder of search giant Google and worth over $16bn got hitched to his long-time love Anne Wojcicki earlier this month in the Bahamas, but so secret was the wedding, that it has only recently been confirmed.
According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, the wedding took place under a chuppah with both Brin and Wojcicki confirming their commitment to the Jewish faith, though no rabbi is said to have officiated at the ceremony.
Wojcicki, is the sister of Susan Wojcicki who gave Google office space to start the business.
In 2001, Brin’s mother Eugenia commented she hoped he would find a Jewish bride. “I hope he would keep that in mind,” she said.
Wojcicki, who has a background in biotechnology, has been active in Jewish projects and currently sits on the board of Reboot, a venture that engages Jews to explore their culture.
Recently, Wojcicki launched a biotech company 23andMe which has seen Google itself invest several million dollars into it.
Justin Rosenstein was a top engineer at Google serving three years as Google´s Product Manager for Page Creator. Rosenstein was one of the first employees that Facebook´s Jewish boss Mark Zuckerberg poached from Google as Facebook began its rise in 2007. In 2008 Rosenstein left Facebook with Facebook´s likewise Jewish co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, to form a new company.
 Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (left) andJustin Rosenstein |
Sheryl Sandberg
Another Jewish profile who has been important in the shaping of Google is Sheryl Sandberg.
Sheryl Sandberg was Google Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, a position from where she built and managed the online sales channels for advertising and publishing and operations for consumer products globally. Sandberg was behind Google´s AdWords, and sat in the board of Google´s philantropic arm Google.org.
Before Google, Sandberg worked for the Jew Lawrence Summers, first when he was Chief Economist of the World Bank, then as his Chief of Staff when Summers was Treasury Secretrary in the ClintonAdministration.
The Jewish Chronicle (December 4, 2008) ran an article on the book “Jewish Wisdom for Business Success” – a book by Rabbi Levi Brackman and Jewish journalist Sam Jaffe – where they argue that the Torah and ancient rabbinic texts are not simply guides for holy living, they can also provide helpful career advice. The Jewish Chronicle writes:
Their book combines tips on good business practice gleaned from the Bible, Midrash and Kabbalah with examples of success stories such as Andy Klein, who quit corporate law to start a brewery and ended up with an investment bank, or Sheryl Sandberg, who rose to become vice president for global sales for Google. And while there are role models to emulate, there also ones to avoid: Pharaoh the gas ruach (man of coarse spirit) or Korah, the ba’al ga’avah, the arrogant egotist.
 Sheryl Sandberg |
As Vice President of Google´s Global Sales Sandberg was behind the AdWords project which links paid advertisements to search results, a gadget that allowed Google to turn their search engine into “extremely profitable business”, as Rabbi Levi Brackman and journalist Sam Jaffe write in their book “Jewish Wisdom for Business Success”, p. 2. They have the case of Sheryl Sandberg in the first chapter in their book as an example of Jewish business sucess. In the same p. 2 of their book:
Early in 2008, she left Google to become the second-in-command of Facebook, the emerging social-networking company.
Sheryl Sandberg – Jewish “second-in-command of Facebook” – is presently Chief Operating Officer at Facebook. As COO, Sandberg is responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand its presence globally. Sandberg manages sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy and communications and reports directly to Facebook’s Jewish CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Sheryl Sandberg is well connected to the Jewish community and the “philantropy” business, a favourite Jewish pastime where they can take a small part of their enormous wealth gained from the “goyim” and put it in small projects completely after their taste, to show how humane, generous and an openminded they are. Sandberg was thus with Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, on a joint venture “addressing global poverty and social justice issues through philanthropy”, December 10, 2008.
She also sponsors Jewish activities at for instance the Joshman Family Jewish Community Center, a center that not so surprisingly also has an “Israel connection”, as their website says. The Joshman Centerwrites on this “Israel connection”:
Our mission is to strengthen relationships between American Jews and the Israeli émigré community and to build a deeper connection to Israel.
Sandberg was included in Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women of 2007.
She is married to former Yahoo! music head David Goldberg with whom she has two children.
More Google Jews – Elliot Schrage and Ethan Beard
 Elliot Schrage |
The Jew Elliot Schrage was since 2005 Google´s Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, the man who ran Google´s PR. He had this important position until May 2008 when he left for Facebook to work under the same role.
At Google, he broadened the company’s messaging from a focus on only product PR to include all aspects of corporate, financial, policy, philanthropic and internal communications. Before Google Shrage served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Zionist infested “public policy think tank”.
Schrage together with the Jewish US Holocaust Museum launched the Darfur tool to Google Earth (see article U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Join in Online Darfur Mapping Initiative http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/darfur_mapping.html):
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today joined with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to unveil an unprecedented online mapping initiative aimed at furthering awareness and action in the Darfur region of Sudan. Crisis in Darfur, enables more than 200 million Google Earth™ mapping service users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth. This information will appear as a Global Awareness layer in Google Earth starting today.
Google Earth’s Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs, joined Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield and Darfurian Daowd Salih at the launch.
Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.
“Educating today’s generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth,” says Bloomfield. “When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most.”
“At Google, we believe technology can be a catalyst for education and action,” said Elliot Schrage, Google Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs. “Crisis in Darfur will enable Google Earth users to visualize and learn about the destruction in Darfur as never before and join the Museum’s efforts in responding to this continuing international catastrophe.”
Of course spreading the knowledge of Israel´s genocidal destruction of Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza in the 2009 assault is not part of this education.
 Ethan Beard |
Another actor is Ethan Beard who was Google´s Director of Social Media. He has since left for Facebook to become Director of Facebook’s Business Development and then Facebook’s Director of Platform marketing. There are indications that he is Jewish.
Manber – Google´s Israeli Vice President of Engineering
Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Udi Manber, is Israeli and a graduate from the Israel´s Technion Institute in Haifa.
He has a long record of top jobs in Internet related positions.
Manber became the chief scientist at Yahoo! in 1998.
In 2002, he joined Amazon.com, where he became “chief algorithms officer” and a Vice President. He was later appointed CEO of the Amazon subsidiary company A9.com, where he led the company’s A9 search engine work. (Please see an article on Amazon´s support for Israel.)
In 2006, Manber was hired by Google as one of Google´s Vice Presidents of Engineering. In December 2007, he announced Knol, Google’s new project to create a knowledge repository.
Mandber as a senior Google operative, interacts with the Judeo-Zionist community.
Here is an advertisment which discloses how Google´s Manber will sit with a Rabbi and discuss Talmud and the Web (http://www.oakland.com/google-s-talmud-the-web-jewish-culture-and-the-power-of-associative-thinking-e394931):
Thu Sep 18, 2008
Contemporary Jewish Museum presents
Google’s Talmud: The Web, Jewish Culture, and the Power of Associative Thinking
Location
The Contemporary Jewish Museum
736 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103district: Downtown/Financial District
Location Date and Time
Thu Sep 18, 2008 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM)Description
One of the hallmarks of Jewish culture and scholarship is an emphasis on commentary and “associative thinking,” a method essential to the creation of the Talmud and thousands of years of Biblical commentary. Udi Manber, Google’s Vice President for Engineering and best-selling technology critic Howard Rheingold will join Rabbi Lawrence Kushner in a panel discussion exploring the connections between art, technology, and Jewish culture, as seen through the new social, intellectual, and spiritual implications of the idea of “search.” This will be followed by a discussion with Dan Schifrin, the Museum’s director of public programs and writer in residence.
Advertisement for the event was also made in the Jewish Weekly: http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/35726/calendar/
 Udi Manber, Google´s Israeli Vice President of Engineering |
Google’s Jewish guru of giving
In the article “Google’s guru of giving” (http://www.financialexpress.com/news/googles-guru-of-giving/265113/0), January 24, 2008, The Financial Express details Larry Brilliant. Dr Brilliant led the Internet giant’s philanthropic arm Google.org, where he ruled over a and 40-strong team:
As well as adopting the informal company motto, “Don’t be evil”, the internet search firm’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided to commit Google to engage in serious philanthropy. Innovative as ever, they created a new sort of philanthropic entity, a division of the company that could pursue its mission through both for-profit investing and making charitable grants. This, they hoped, would one day “eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.”
It would be funded with 1% of the firm’s equity, annual profits and employees’ time.
In February 2006, after a lengthy search, Dr Brilliant was appointed to run Google.org. Media reports focused on the old hippy’s colourful past, not least his spell as a doctor with the Grateful Dead, a legendary 1960s rock band. What attracted his new employers was his unique record of success both in running Silicon Valley tech firms and in implementing large-scale solutions to big social problems.
[…]
Though he has taken nearly two years to produce a strategy for Google.org, Dr Brilliant has not been taking things easy. He may have added a taste for Hindu meditation to his Detroit Jewish roots (he once shared a guru with Apple’s boss, Steve Jobs), but he is a driven man, travelling widely and seeking advice from hundreds of people, pushing himself harder than friends say is wise for a sexagenarian. When he arrived at Google.org he found extraordinarily high expectations, a blank sheet of paper to fill with a strategy, and “microscopic attention” from outside on what it was doing.
During his time as Google´s philantropic boss Brilliant combined his work with his dedication for Jews and Judaism. For instance Brilliant, as Executive Director of Google.org, appeared as a speaker at the Jewish Community Federation in San Fransisco´s Business Leadership Council Breakfast meeting. February 28, 2007. According to the organization´s homepage (http://www.sfjcf.org/aboutjcf/press/2007/brilliant.asp):
Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org, will share his vision for “Healing a Broken World” with attendees at the second annual Business Leadership Council Breakfast on Wednesday, February 28, 2007.
[…]
Dr. Larry Brilliant is the Executive Director of Google.org, the umbrella organization which includes the Google Foundation as well as partnerships with and contributions to for-profit and nonprofit entities.
[…]
Sponsored by AT&T and Levisohn Venture Partners, this special BLC event is open to all donors who contribute $1,000 or more to the 2007 San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation’s Annual Campaign. Donors under the age of 40 who contribute $500 are also welcome.The Jewish Community Federation is the central organization for fundraising, planning, outreach and leadership development for Jewish communities in San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma counties. In fiscal year 2006, the Federation’s annual campaign allocated $18.3 million to some 60 agencies providing social services, educational and cultural programs in the Bay Area, in the U.S., Israel and elsewhere in the world. In fiscal year 2006, the Federation’s Endowment Fund, with assets exceeding $1.8 billion, provided more than $203 million for a variety of grants, seed projects and emergency needs. For more information, call 415.777.0411 or visit www.sfjcf.org.
So here we can see how the Google boss fraternises with an organization that is interrelated to the Zionist state.
In April 2009 Larry Brilliant, after 3 years at Google, said he was parting ways with the Internet giant, leaving Google.org to join a new organisation set up by former eBay President and Jew, Jeff Skoll. But Dr Brilliant also said he would remain as an advisor to Google.
Google’s Israel connections
Here follows a most revealing article on how Google´s Sergey Brin, Facebook´s Mark Zuckerberg and Yahoo´s President Susan Decker, are invited by the Israeli leadership to Israel, during Israel´s 60th anniversary celebrations:
Facebook, Google founders to attend Jerusalem conference in May
By Guy Grimland, Ha´aretz Correspondent
Ha´aretz 01/04/2008
Co-founder of internet giant Google, Sergey Brin, will join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Yahoo president Susan Decker at a presidential panel on technology to be held at the Jerusalem International Convention Center May 13-15.
The convention, which was formed at the initiative of President Shimon Peres, will also be attended by a number of Israeli political, religious and financial leaders, as well as academics and cultural figures.
The panel will discuss issues facing technology in today’s age and the future, in particular in regard to how it will affect Israel and the Jewish world.
Former UK prime minister Tony Blair will also take part in the conference, as will French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former prime minister of the Czech Republic Vaclev Havel, Nobel Prize Laureate Eli Wiesel, and Georgia President Michael Saakashvili
The Israel News Agency also writes (http://www.israelnewsagency.com/israel60thbirthdaypresidentsconferenceshimonperesanniversaryjerusalemolmertfacingtomorrow48050708.html):
In attendance, in addition to many national presidents and heads of state will be dignitaries from the worlds of business and academia. Among them are Sergey Brin, founder of Google and Susan Decker of Yahoo. Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson will be serving as the honorary chairpersons for the Israel 60th Birthday Presidential Conference which has enthusiastically attracted the attention of Jewish leaders and others worldwide.
And B’ nai B’ rith Magazine (http://bnaibrith.org/magazines/2008FallBBM/future-concerns-mariaschin.cfm) are also happy with the representation:
I was particularly impressed with the large numbers of young people in attendance, representing Israeli universities and aliyah organizations like MASA. At the conclusion of the panel discussion moderated by Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi and featuring, among others, Brin, the co-founder of Google; Susan Decker of Yahoo; and Rupert Murdoch, several dozen young adults crowded on stage to meet the speakers—and more than one business card was exchanged.
 Google´s Sergey Brin at Western Wall, Jerusalem |
We write more on the Zionists attending this conference in our section on Yahoo!.
In March 2012 the Israeli President Shimon Peres – the arch-Zionist and the man behind the Qana No 1 massacre in Lebanon – visited the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley, USA, where he was gladly greeted by Google’s Jewish boss Sergey Brin. The pics below are from one of Google’s Israeli-Jewish employees and can be accessed through the following link:https://plus.google.com/u/0/102600774742322762226/posts/5o5uBKzZYGp
Israeli site YNet News writes in an article 8th March 2012:
Peres receives 3D tour of his life at Google
Google founder provides president with virtual tour of important milestones in his life during his visit to Silicon Valley. Peres asks Brin to ‘deepen cooperation with Israel’s R&D centers’
By Yair Altman
President Shimon Peres met with Google founder Sergey Brin on Thursday, during a tour of Google Headquarters in California. Peres is on a four-day trip through Silicon Valley, where he will promote Israel’s hi-tech industry.
During his visit, Peres received a virtual tour of his childhood neighborhood in Poland with the help of Google Earth’s 3D satellite software.
The virtual tour, which was displayed on five 3D screens, began in Peres’ place of birth – Vishneva (known today as Belarus). Brin continued the tour with a virtual glimpse of the moon, where the two were able to look at a computerized model of the “Apollo 11” spacecraft.
A statement by the President’s Office said that during the tour, Peres requested to look over Israel and Jerusalem, the Western Wall and the Church of Mary Magdalene, all in 3D.
Following the tour, Brin and Peres held a meeting in which Brin showed Peres some other technological developments.
Peres reportedly asked his host to expand the cooperation with Israel’s R&D centers.
Throughout his four-day visit to Silicone Valley, President Peres also met with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, who helped him launch a personal page on Facebook.
In addition, Peres also answered questions from the site’s users and launched a YouTube video clip meant to promote his Facebook page.
See also a revealing Youtube clip of the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vlSdcUnZSI
Google´s business cooperation with Israel
Ha´aretz online edition 15/05/2008, writes:
Google co-founder lauds Israeli innovation in tech, environment
By Lior Kodner, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service
Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Thursday lauded Israeli innovations in technology and environmental efforts, saying Israel “takes our climate challenges very seriously.”
Brin, visiting as a delegate to President Shimon Peres’ Presidential Conference, told Haaretz that these challenges have “great geopolitcal ramifications on this country, in addition to environmental ones.”
He noted that Israel’s leading efforts in the field of sustainable energy, saying: “Obviously in Israel they need to innovate with water and things like that. I was really intrigued to see drip irrigation. I just realized that came out of Israel.”
Brin gave particular attention to Israel’s work in environmentally friendly transportation.
A prototype of the world’s first fully electric car was demonstrated for the first time on Sunday in Tel Aviv, by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi.
Developers hope the car will revolutionize transportation in the country and serve as a pilot for the rest of the world. If all goes as planned, Israel will be the first country to have electric cars on its highways in large numbers in the next few years.
Brin also spoke about new projects ongoing at Google, including the “huge range of efforts” being made on mobile technology and the patience needed in the field.
“I think it takes a while to devlop the technology, to devlop,
to educate advertisers about it,” he said. “We have to bootstrap everything. our search based targeted ads took a number of yearsand people are expecting overnight that you work a miracle. It is a combination of technology, advertising networks, abd user expectations. All those things have to come together and that takes time,” he said.
During his visit, Brin toured Jewish sites, including the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, announced the establishment of an R&D center in Israel. Ha´aretz 30/01/2006 writes:
Google founder plans R&D center in Israel
By Guy Rolnik
DAVOS, Switzerland – Google “is in the process of establishing an R&D center in Israel,” Sergey Brin, a founder of the Internet search titan, told Haaretz during the World Economic Forum here. Brin and co-founder Larry Page were among the more visible participants at the economic conference. Both have a solid connection with Israeli entrepreneurs in the Internet field.
A Google executive told Haaretz that the company had recently recruited a large number of academics, engineers, mathematicians, statisticians and economists for additional development of the company’s search engine algorithm and its smart ad systems on the Net. There is still a shortage of quality personnel for developing analytic tools and predicting the massive volume of information accumulated on the search engine.
[…]
Last summer, Google decided to establish a local marketing and sales branch in Israel to bolster its advertising revenues in the Israel market. Google hired Meir Brand to head its Israel office, choosing a former Microsoft executive just as it had done in China.
[…]
Ha´aretz interview with Sergey Brin in Israel, May 29, 2008:
[…]
This is Brin’s third visit to Israel. The first time was with his parents, when he was still a teenager, and the second was in September 2003, when Google was still a relatively small, privately owned company. Last week, however, Brin arrived here as the head of one of the largest and most influential companies in the world.How has Israel changed since your previous visits?
“It’s pretty impressive just to see how the tech industry has continued to grow. The development, kind of just looking at the city of Tel Aviv. I mean, there are a bunch of buildings. Maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like there are lots of buildings that weren’t here when I was here last. And I’ve just seen some of the companies and their state of development, the levels developed here – it’s just incredible.”
[…]
Did your family ever consider immigrating to Israel?“Boy, I need to ask them that. In fact, my great-grandmother lived in the U.S. for a period of time, so we did have some ties to the U.S. I think my dad actually had a colleague who had moved to the U.S., who had given him greater certainty [with respect to] the job market. And those were the big factors. But I can ask. My parents are here with me – I mean, not in the office, but in Israel.”
In hindsight, considering what you see now in the U.S. and Israel, if your parents had come here, do you think we would have Google today?
[Laughs] “Look, I’ve been very lucky in my life, and I’m sure there’ve been lots of random circumstances that have contributed to that, so I probably would not be the first to change it. But looking at the kinds of innovation and development that I see here now, I certainly think it’s possible to enjoy great success coming to Israel.”
Google´s cooperation with Jewish censors
Below are some articles illustrating how Google assists Jewish Internet censorship. The articles show that Google follows dictats from ADL and the Zionist Organization of America, that Google “robots” censor pro-Palestinian bloggers, and that sites like Radio Islam are censored.
- ADL Praises Google for Responding to Concerns About Rankings of Hate Sites
includes letter from Google Jew Sergey Brin and Google´s explantion for the word “Jew” - How the Zionist Organization of America shapes Google´s policies
ZOA complains about “anti-Semitism” …and Google adjusts promptly - ZOA Convinces Google to Change the Earth
the Zionist Organization of America changes the way we view the World through Google Earth
- Google´s war on pro-Palestinian bloggers
Google´s “robots” unmasked, Is Google ethnic cleansing the Internet?
- Uruknet cut off from Google News again! – external link
information on how an Iraq war information site is being censored by Google - Jew Gotta’ Friend At Google – what is “hate speech”?
Google News stops indexing what it calls “hate spech” - “Google This”! – on Google´s Israel rush
by Philip Jones, Rense.com - Google Fascists?
looking into the worrying implications of Google’s near monopoly of web search engines - Censorship of the Internet – study reveals Google censorship of Radio Islam´s sites
by Germar Rudolf
Here we will give attention to one extra article to show how the Zionist organization ADL cooperates with Google. In 2007 a conference was held in Israel with ADL, the International Network Against Cyberhate, and Google´s Israel Director Meir Brand. Ha´aretz, 12/11/2007, writes:
Organizers of the conference representing the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group that counters anti-Semitism, brought examples of anti-Jewish hate material freely available on the Internet, and participants called for more action to stop it.
[…]
He [Meir Brand] said Google removes results from its search index only when required to by law, for example, when copyright infringement is an issue. In Germany and Austria, he said, Google removes Nazi content, which is against the law there.Recognizing the problem, however, Google has instituted a warning system for hate entries, taking viewers to a page warning that some of the search results may be offensive, and noting that opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect Google’s views.
Just as a small reminder ADL:s Director Abraham Foxman was one of many top Jewish dignitaries in Israel celebrating Israel´s 60th Anniversary back in 2008.
Appendix
Excerpts from the article “Sergey Brin: the Google revolutionary”, by Mark Malseed, The Jewish Chronicle, April 6, 2007 [the complete article can be read here]:
“This intensity emerges during weekly strategy meetings, where he and Page — who share the title of Google president — command the last word on approving new products, reviewing new hires and funding long-term research.
Brin also holds sway over the unscientific but all-important realms of people, policy and politics.“
“Brin’s Jewish sensibility is, likewise, grounded in his family’s experience of life in the Soviet Union, and their eventual emigration to the United States. “I do somewhat feel like a minority,” he says. “Being Jewish, especially in Russia, is one aspect of that. Then, being an immigrant in the US. And then, since I was significantly ahead in maths in school, being the youngest one in a class. I never felt like a part of the majority. So I think that is part of the Jewish heritage in a way.”“
“As a young boy, though, he had only a vague awareness of why his family wanted to leave their native Russia. He picked up the ugly details of the antisemitism they faced bit by bit years later, he says. Nevertheless, he sensed, early on, all of the things that he wasn’t – he wasn’t Russian; he wasn’t welcome in his own country; he wasn’t going to get a fair shake in advancing through its schools. Further complicating his understanding of his Jewish identity was the fact that, under the atheist Soviet regime, there were few religious or cultural models of what being Jewish was. The negatives were all he had.“
“For many Soviet Jews, exit visas never came. But, in May 1979, the Brins were granted papers to leave the USSR. “We hoped it would happen,” Genia says, “but we were completely surprised by how quickly it did.” The timing was fortuitous – they were among the last Jews allowed to leave until the Gorbachev era. Sergey Brin, who turned six that summer, remembers what followed as simply unsettling” – literally so. “We were in different places from day to day,” he says. The journey was a blur. First Vienna, where the family was met by representatives of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped thousands of Eastern European Jews establish new lives in the West. Then, on to the suburbs of Paris, where Michael’s “unofficial” Jewish PhD adviser, Anatole Katok, had arranged a temporary research position for him.“
“One thing the Brins shared with thousands of other families emigrating to the West from the Soviet Union was the discovery that, suddenly, they were free to be Jews. “Russian Jews lacked the vocabulary to even articulate what they were feeling,” says Lenny Gusel, the founder of a San Francisco-based network of Russian-Jewish immigrants. “They were considered Jews back home. Here, they were considered Russians. Many longed just to assimilate as Americans.” Gusel’s group, which he calls the “79ers”, after the peak year of immigration in the 1970s, and its New York cousin, RJeneration, have attracted hundreds of 20- and 30-something immigrants who grapple with their Jewish identity. “Sergey is the absolute emblem of our group, the number one Russian-Jewish immigrant success story,” he says.
The Brins were no different from their fellow immigrants in that being Jewish was an ethnic, not a religious, experience. “We felt our Jewishness in different ways, not by keeping kosher or going to synagogue. It is genetic,” explains Sergey’s father Michael. “We were not very religious. My wife doesn’t eat on Yom Kippur; I do.” Genia interjects: “We always have a Passover dinner. We have a Seder. I have the recipe for gefilte fish from my grandmother.” Religious or not, on arriving in the suburbs of Washington, the Brins were adopted by a synagogue, Mishkan Torah of Greenbelt, Maryland, which helped them acquire furnishings for their home. “We didn’t need that much, but we saw how much the community helped other families,” Genia says. Sergey attended Hebrew school at Mishkan Torah for almost three years but hated the language instruction – and everything else, too. “He was teased there by other kids and he begged us not to send him any more,” his other remembers. “Eventually, it worked.” the Conservative congregation turned out to be too religious for the Brins and they drifted.
When a three-week trip to Israel awakened 11- year-old Sergey’s interest in all things Jewish, the family inquired at another synagogue about restarting studies to prepare for a barmitzvah. But the rabbi said it would take more than a year to catch up and Sergey abandoned the pursuit. If there was one Jewish value the Brin family upheld without reservation, Michael says, it was scholarship.“
Sergey Brin
“What came next is Google legend. In the spring of 1995, Sergey met an opinionated computer- science student from the University of Michigan named Larry Page. They argued over the course of two days, each finding the other cocky and obnoxious. They also formed an instant bond, relishing the intellectual combat. Like Sergey, Larry is the son of high-powered intellects steeped in computer science. The two young graduate students also share a Jewish background.
Larry’s maternal grandfather made aliyah, and his mother was raised Jewish. Larry, however, brought up in the mould of his father, a computer-science professor whose religion was technology, does not readily identify as a Jew. He, too, never had a barmitzvah. Larry and Sergey soon began working on ways to harness information on the web, spending so much time together that they took on a joint identity, LarryandSergey”.“
“Their venture quickly bore fruit. After viewing a quick demo, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim (himself a Jewish immigrant from Germany) wrote a $100,000 cheque to “Google, Inc”.“
“They are without a doubt two of the most eligible bachelors on Google Earth, but both are reported to be in serious relationships – Sergey is reportedly engaged to Anne Wojcicki, a healthcare investor and the sister of Google executive Susan Wojcicki, who owned the garage where Google got started. In a 2001 interview, Genia said she hoped Sergey would find “somebody exciting who could be really interesting to him… [who] had a sense of humour that could match his”. As one might expect, she also prefers that Sergey marry a Jewish girl. “I hope that he would keep it in mind,” she confided.“
“The Ten Commandments it is not, but Google does operate with a moral code of sorts. “Don’t be evil” is the maxim supposed to guide behaviour at all levels of the company. When pressed for clarification, Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt has famously said: “Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.” One malevolent practice, in Google’s view, is tampering with or otherwise censoring the list of results produced by a Google search. An early test of the Google founders’ commitment to providing unfiltered information struck very close to home. The antisemitic website Jew Watch appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew”, prompting Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the site from the top of its listings. Google refused. Sergey said at the time: “I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles.” As a compromise, Google displays a warning at the top of questionable pages.“
“Viewed against the backdrop of Sergey’s distaste for authority, the decision to cave in to China’s totalitarian leadership seems out of character. Sergey’s public comments on the matter have evolved to reflect this contradiction. While defending the decision at first, he later acknowledged that Google had “compromised” its principles. “Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense,” he has said, but adding: “It’s not where we chose to go right now.” Does a company founded by two Jews, no matter how assimilated, necessarily retain some defining Jewish characteristics? The Google masterminds’ penchant for pushing boundaries – without asking permission – might as well be called chutzpah.
However you label it, it is an attitude that runs deeply through Google and may help explain why the company is embroiled in lawsuits over many of its new projects: the aggressive scanning of library books it does not own; display of copyrighted material; and copyright issues connected to its acquisition of YouTube, the online video site whose popularity rests in part on the availability of pirated television and movie clips. Google’s first employee and several other early hires were Jewish and, when the initial winter-holiday season rolled around, a menorah rather than a Christmas tree graced the lobby. Google’s former chef, Charlie Ayers, cooked up latkes, brisket, tzimmes and matzah-ball soup for Chanucah meals and turned the Passover Seder into a Google tradition.
To some, Google’s emphasis on academic achievement – hiring only the best and the brightest and employing hundreds of PhDs – could be considered Jewish. So, perhaps, could “Don’t be evil”. With its hint of tikkun olam, the Kabbalistic concept of “repairing the world”, it reflects the company’s commitment to aggressive philanthropy.“
“Nevertheless, he and his parents do support a few charities. “There are people who helped me and my family out. I do feel responsible to those organisations,” he says. One of them is Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the group that helped the Brins come to the United States. Genia serves on its board and heads its project to create a digital record of Jewish-immigrant archives. Has Sergey been a target of antisemitism since he left the Soviet Union? “I’ve experienced it,” he says. “Usually, it is fairly subtle. People arp on about all the media companies being run by Jewish executives, with the implication of a conspiracy… I think I’m fortunate that it doesn’t really affect me personally, but there are hints of it all around. That’s why I think it is worth noting.”“
“Several years ago, Sergey and Larry visited a school for gifted maths students near Tel Aviv. When they took to the stage, the audience roared, as if they were rock stars. Every student there, many of them, like Sergey, immigrants, from the former Soviet Union, knew of Google. Sergey began, to the crowd’s delight, with a few words in Russian, which he still speaks at home with his parents. “I have standard Russian-Jewish parents,” he then continued in English. “My dad is a maths professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top 10 places in a maths competition throughout all Israel.”
The students applauded their achievement and the recognition from Sergey, unaware that he was setting up a joke. “What I have to say,” he continued, “is in the words of my father: ‘What about the other three?'” The students laughed. They knew where he was coming from. That Sergey has parlayed his skills into unimaginable business success does not mean those “standard Russian-Jewish parents” are ready to let him off the academic hook.“
“He met Mark Zuckerberg in 2002 after they had joined the same fraternity which primarily concentrated on activities within the Jewish community.
‘We ate Shabbat dinner together,’ Hasit said. ‘Every year we raised money for charities in Israel. Mark was one of the members of the fraternity, like many other Jewish students at Harvard.’
Hasit, who wears a skullcap, says the 25-year-old Zuckerberg feels an affinity with Judaism. ‘He fasts on Yom Kippur,’ Hasit says of Zuckerberg. ‘Sometimes he would come to the Hillel House, a Jewish organization that ran various activities.’ “
– The Jew Ariel Hasit, who now has joined the Israeli Defense Forces, on his personal experience of the Jewish Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Ha´aretz, 10/05/2009.
Jewish founder and CEO
The popular social networking site Facebook, launched in February 2004, has a 100% Jewish founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Jews readily boast about this fact. The Jewish etnocentrist site Jew or Not Jew: Choosing the Chosen People, see logo below, have a special entry for Zuckerberg (as they have for Google´s Sergey Brin andLarry Page), where Zuckerberg gets their “Jew Score” total of 12 (4 + 4 + 4).
See: http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=369 .
The site, which should be reagarded as some case of internal Jewish humour, explains the meaning of this score:
About the Jew Score
We evaluate how Jewish a person is based on three factors. How Jewish they are internally, how Jewish they are externally and how much we want that person to be a Jew in the first place.
In practice, the I Score tends to refer to birth history with some adjustments for how we imagine they see/saw themselves. The O Score is for how Jewish they look and act. The K Score stands for Kvell (pride) and is subject to the whims of the creators of this website.
The Jew Score refers to our opinion only and is affected by but not definitive of one’s actual Jewishness.
The site of the World Jewish Digest, as another example, also counts Mark Zuckerberg as one of their examples of Jewish influentials in their list “10 to watch in 2008 – WJS´s shortlist to Jewish standouts” . Zuckerberg, “born into a well-to-do Jewish-American family in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y”, gets the rankning place of 3 in their list of 10 influential Jews.
  Mark Zuckerberg, in the picture to the r |
Zuckerberg´s Jewish entourage at Facebook
The New York Times, May 13, 2009, reported:
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted that “Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a Jewish former Harvard University student.”
Mr. Schnitt [a Facebook spokesman] told ABC that while some employees of the social-networking service came from families marked by the Holocaust, that was not influencing their decision:
Many of us at Facebook have direct personal connection to the Holocaust, through parents who were forced to flee Europe or relatives who could not escape. We believe in Facebook’s mission that giving people tools to make the world more open is a better way to combat ignorance or deception than censorship, though we recognize that others, including those at the company, disagree.
So here we learn from the Facebook spokesman Mr. Schnitt that “many of us at Facebook have direct personal connection to the Holocaust”, which of course means nothing else than that they are Jewish.
So who are these Jewish actors?
To begin with, in the absolute beginning, when Zuckerberg decided to spread his new Facebook project to other schools than Harvard, he enlisted help from his Jewish friend Dustin Moskovitz. Moskovitzthen became the Vice President of Engineering of Facebook.
 Dustin Moskovitz |
They got their first funding from another Jew, German-born technology entrepreneur Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal.
We here recommend reading an article from the The Guardian (14 Jan, 2008) on the people behind Facebook which has more information on Thiel. The Guardian concludes that:
“… the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel.”
 Peter Thiel |
As a typical Jewish etnocentrist Thiel prefers to deal with other Jews. His business partner with whom he who founded PayPal is the Ukrainan-born now-American Jew Max Rafael Levchin.
 David Sacks |
 George Zachary |
Other Jews Thiel is interacting with are David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer, and George Zachary, “a friend of Max and Peter’s” and partner of the JewEd Skoll from eBay.
Below follows an excerpt from “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0”, by Sarah Lacy, (see:http://www.metroactive.com/metro/06.11.08/cover-supermen-0824.html) on Thiel´s “PayPal mafia”:
The PayPal mafia even had Hollywood success. Jeff Skoll was one of the first eBay executives who became friends with the PayPal crew when eBay bought the company in 2002. He started up Participant Productions on a lark, and it has been one of the most profitable productions companies in Hollywood. Among its first four films were Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, North Country, and An Inconvenient Truth. Skoll’s success convinced Max and Peter to start dabbling in Hollywood, bankrolling the 2006 indie flick Thank You for Smoking, along with David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer.
While Sacks continued to play the Hollywood game, he also launched a new social networking site for families, called Geni.com. It allows people to fill out their family trees and link them to the family trees of spouses and in-laws. Anyone on the tree can add to the tree, the idea being that over time you discover people you’re related to that you didn’t know. It’s a bold idea, one of the first Web 2.0 start-ups aimed squarely at families. Peter Thiel, naturally, backed it early on. And in Geni’s first venture capital round with Charles River Ventures, it got nosebleed $100 million valuation. The CRV partner who wrote the check was George Zachary, Skoll’s early partner in Participant Productions and a friend of Max and Peter’s. By 2006, the PayPal mafia was an incestuous world where, for now, everyone seemed to be making lots of money.
Thiel makes up one fourth of the Board members of Facebook. Thus apart from providing the money, he really has a lot of influence – just as The Guardian had noted.
Thiel – “the real face behind Facebook” – is a Zionist
What The Guardian failed to tell is that Thiel also has an Israel agenda.
The Israeli-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies writes (http://www.adelsoninstitute.org.il/OnAgenda.aspx?id=62&from=a):
On Tuesday, May 12, 2009, The Adelson Institute hosted Richard Perle, former assistant to the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the Reagan administration, and Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of PayPal and President of Clarium Capital Management. The topic of discussion was: “The first 100 days of the Obama administration”.
Perle briefed the Adleson Institue’s staff and faculty and said that the outcome of Obama’s new approach towards adversaries will be tested in a few months time.
Thiel, who participated in Perle’s briefing, said that there is an incredible gap between Israel’s reality and its potential. People talk about China, India and Brazil as emerging market countries, he added, while Israel is underrated. According to Thiel, all it takes is a short visit to Israel in order to appreciate the incredible talent, intensity and drive of the Israelis.
It should here be reminded that Richard Perle that Thiel met in a briefing, is the infamous Neo-con from the Bush era who was one of the main Jewish architects behind the Iraq invasion and war in 2003.
Facebook sponsor Peter Thiel reveals his Israel agenda in a video speech he made for the Adelson Institute and which can be seen through the following link:http://www.adelsoninstitute.org.il/MediaViewer.aspx?id=57
The Adelson Institute gives the following description of Thiel´s video message:
Israel is Truly the Country of the Future, May 17, 2009
There is an incredible gap between Israel’s reality and its potential, says Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of PayPal and President of Clarium Capital Management. Thiel, a guest of the Adelson Institute for Strategic studies, participated in Richard Perle’s briefing at the Adelson Institute. People talk about China, India and Brazil as emerging market countries, says Thiel, while Israel is underrated. All it takes is a short visit in order to appreciate the incredible talent, intensity and drive of the Israelis.
In the video Peter Thiel – economic sponsor and Facebook Board member – hails the Jewish state of Israel. Here follows a transcript of some of his statements in the video:
“I believe that Israel is a truly extraordinary place.”
“… an incredible potential…”
“Just visiting here [in Israel] for a few days one is always struck by the incredible talent and intensity and drive of the people.”
“I think that if Israel is able to resolve some of these issues, that surround it over the next few years, it will probably be the best place in the world.”
“I believe the future is not in cheap labour or cheap capital or in real estate. I believe the future is in technology and in that sense perhaps Israel is truly the country of the future.”
The Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem is a 100 % Zionist institution.
We here reproduce the Mission Statement of the institute Thiel cooperates with:
The Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem is an academic and research institute founded by its chairman, Natan Sharansky, in 2007. The Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies develops, articulates and builds support for the strategic principles needed to address the challenges currently facing Israel and the West. Israel, as the only democracy in this region surrounded by totalitarian governments, is on the cutting edge of the challenges and dangers confronting Western civilization everywhere.
As part of this overall effort, the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies seeks to explore how the advancement of freedom, democracy, and human rights can be marshaled as an effective measure to secure and strengthen international stability and security. The Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies also seeks to examine international law in light of the new forms of asymmetric warfare and terror; the establishment of credible deterrence against guerilla and terror organizations and the states that sponsor them; the appropriate response to weapons of mass destruction; and the strengthening of Israel’s relations with its strategic allies.
Natan Sharansky, founder and chairman of the institute, is a racist Russian Jew and Israeli politician (former deputy Prime Minister) famous for his “tough” stance on the Palestinians. Palestinian resistance to Zionist domination is branded as “terrorism”. Sharansky writes in Jan. 15, 2009 (Bloomberg.com) on the ongoing Israeli slaughter in Gaza:
Terrorism is a cancer that can’t be cured through “proportional” treatments. It requires invasive surgery.
Here follows another article on Peter Thiel and Israel from [vc]cafe (http://www.vccafe.com/2008/01/02/peter-thiel-gambles-on-the-next-internet-hit-israels-hooja/):
Peter Thiel gambles on the next internet hit – Israel’s Hooja
Peter Thiel knows a thing or two about consumer internet. After all, he’s a PayPal cofounder, one of Facebook’s board members and its first investor ($500,000) way before its $15 billion valuation, giving him a hefty return of a billion. Thiel is known as a savvy investor with a ‘golden touch’ that tends to invest small amounts early on taking a ‘hands-off’ approach with management (learn more about his investment strategy in Thiel’s recent WSJ profile).
Apart from Facebook, Thiel invested in some of the internet’s biggest brand names early on, including: Yelp, Slide, LinkedIn and Friendster.These days, Peter Thiel is managing the hedge fund Clarium Capital, which manages $2 billion under management and he’s also a partner in the Founders Fund, that recently raised $220 million for its second fund. Now, for the first time, Thiel is betting an Israeli tech startup, to be the next winner.
Globes reports that Thiel, along with a group of private investors, raised $1.5 million for Hooja, an Israel-based startup founded in April of 2006 by Naama Moran, a former Greylock Partners associate. Hooja is still operating in stealth mode (landing page only) but its known to be developing a unique search technology that enables content providers to search for personal and social information in the deep web, including social networks. One of Hooja’s investors describes the technology as ’social search’ – basically providing higher ranking to information that a user’s friends are likely to click on.
Other Board members
The other Board members of Facebook apart from Thiel are Mark Zuckerberg himself, the Jewish venture capitalist Jim Breyer, and finally Marc Andreessen.
Jim Breyer also sits in the Board of Directors of Dell, Walmart and Marvel.
 Jim Breyer |
Marc Andreessen is the founder of Netscape (non-Jewish?), but a man who works closely with the Jew Ben Horowitz with whom he founded Opsware. Andreessen has also invested in the Israeli Israel Seed Partners thus becoming a partner of and cooperating with Jonathan Medved, one of Israel’s leading venture capitalists. So Andreesen – Jew or not – is well entangled in the Jewish-Israeli Internet establishment.
 Ben Horowitz |
In our section on Google we detailed Sheryl Sandberg, a Jewish woman who was Google´s Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations.
As Rabbi Levi Brackman and journalist Sam Jaffe write in their book “Jewish Wisdom for Business Success”, p. 2:
Early in 2008, she left Google to become the second-in-command of Facebook, the emerging social-networking company.
The Jewish “second-in-command of Facebook” Sheryl Sandberg is presently Chief Operating Officer. As COO, Sandberg is responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand its presence globally. Sandberg in this position manages sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy and communications and reports directly to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
It can here be repeated that Sandberg is married to another Jew, David Goldberg, former music head at Yahoo!.
Addendum 2012:
The Jew David Fischer – son of Israel’s Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer – is the VP of Advertising and Global Operations at Facebook and oversees sales, advertiser marketing, and customer operations throughout the world.
David Fischer joined Facebook after over seven years at Google, where he was VP of Global Online Sales and Operations and was responsible for Google’s online sales channel, which represented the majority of Google’s customers worldwide. In that role, he helped build Google’s online advertising network into the largest in the world.
For more on Sheryl Sandberg, David Fischer and Facebook’s cooperation with Israel, see important addendum just below under the headline “Facebook and Israel”.
Elliot Schrage |
Another recruit from Google is the Jew Elliot Schrage, now Vice President of Communications, Public Policy and Platform Marketing at Facebook. In this position he is responsible for developing and coordinating key messages about products, corporate business and partnerships. He also oversees the company’s public policy strategy worldwide. At Google Schrage was Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs and in our special section on Google we documented how he worked to promote propaganda together with the Jewish “US Holocaust Memorial”.
Another Jew who has had positions of influence in Facebook was Justin Rosenstein, a top engineer who was one of the first employees Facebook poached from Google, where he was a Product Manager, as Facebook began its rise in 2007.
Both Dusty Moskovitz.and Rosenstein have since left Facebook (2008) to jointly start Internet ventures of their own.
Ethan Beard is head of Platform at Facebook. Earlier he was Director of Business Development. Prior to joining Facebook, he was a Director of Social Media at Google.
Facebook and Israel
The Jewish state sees the importance in Internet Jews such as Mark Zuckerberg. In 2008 the Israeli paper Ha´aretz reported:
Facebook, Google founders to attend Jerusalem conference in May
By Guy Grimland, Ha´aretz Correspondent
Ha´aretz 01/04/2008
Co-founder of internet giant Google, Sergey Brin, will join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Yahoo president Susan Decker at a presidential panel on technology to be held at the Jerusalem International Convention Center May 13-15.
The convention, which was formed at the initiative of President Shimon Peres, will also be attended by a number of Israeli political, religious and financial leaders, as well as academics and cultural figures.
The panel will discuss issues facing technology in today’s age and the future, in particular in regard to how it will affect Israel and the Jewish world.
Former UK prime minister Tony Blair will also take part in the conference, as will French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former prime minister of the Czech Republic Vaclev Havel, Nobel Prize Laureate Eli Wiesel, and Georgia President Michael Saakashvili
Here we see how the young Jewish entrepreneur Zuckerberg, with fellow Internet-Jew Sergey Brin, is invited down to the Jewish state to participate in the celebrations of Israel´s 60th anniversary (which was the reason the meeting was held) and to meet with the top Zionist echelons.
(It should here be noted that Shimon Peres is a war criminal. In 1996 he was responsible, as the leader if the Jewish state, of Israel´s massacre of over 100 Lebanese civilians in Qana.)
On March 11th, 2008, Nick O’Neill posted an interview with Mark Zuckerberg where they touched on the subject of “anti-Semitism” and Internet:
Recently Shimon Peres suggested that Israelis and Jews worldwide use Facebook to fight anti-semitism in addition to inviting Mark Zuckerberg to Israel. I asked him about his thoughts on Facebook as a tool to fight anti-semitism and if Facebook would take proactive measures to fight against it. Mark believes that Facebook need to focus on building useful communication tools and that the users can use these tools to connect and generate more worldly perspectives. As such Facebook does not need to be proactive about it. When asked about whether he will visit Israel next year, he said maybe.
Addendum 1, 2012:
In March 2012 the Israeli President Shimon Peres – the arch-Zionist and the man behind the Qana No 1 massacre in Lebanon visited the Facebook headquarters in the US where he was happily greeted by Facebook´s Jewish boss Mark Zuckerberg. There Zuckerberg helped the elderly Zionist chief create a personal Facebook page – and Peres thereafter added Zuckerberg as his first Facebook “friend”!
Israeli paper Ha’aretz March 6, 2012 writes under the headline “Peres, Mark Zuckerberg launch president’s international Facebook page”:
President Shimon Peres and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched the president’s international Facebook page on Tuesday, with Zuckerberg to first to press ‘like’ to the page.
The festivities began at 7 P.M. Israel time (9 A.M. P.S.T.), with a live press conference with web surfers from around the world. Peres and Zuckerberg then launched the page officially at 8 P.M. Israel time (10 A.M. P.S.T.).
See also the article “Israeli President Shimon Peres Applauds Hollywood’s Influence on Youth“.
Jewess Sheryl Sandberg is a key connector between Israel and Facebook. The Israeli news site YNetNews.com writes on the latest steps of cooperation (underlines below added by Radio Islam) in order to“foster a relationship between the Israeli government and Facebook heads”:
Israel to promote itself on Facebook
By Yitzhak Benhorin
YNetNews, 04.02.2011
Deputy foreign minister meets networking site’s managers to discuss plans for online PR
WASHINGTON – The government intends to turn the social network Facebook into the main platform for Israeli online public relations, investing a lot of resources on creating an efficient strategy to utilize the 600 million-large’ network.
Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon visited the California offices of the network on Friday, and met with company heads including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and VP of Advertising and Global Operations David Fischer, who is the son of Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer.
The Foreign Ministry is set on turning the famous social network into the main platform for Israeli online public relations both in English and in Arabic. Officials in Jerusalem have expressed their belief that Facebook is a friendly platform for communication with young people around the world, allowing for distribution of messages through video clips and games.
Israeli embassies around the world have already begun to manage Facebook pages, but now the Foreign Ministry intends to make more efficient use of the network to improve Israel’s image.
Ayalon’s meetings are intended to foster a relationship between the Israeli government and Facebook heads. Ayalon has also invited Facebook managers to visit Israel in order to meet with internet entrepreneurs and participate in the Presidential Conference expected to take place in Jerusalem next June.
The deputy foreign minister displayed before them Israel’s high-tech abilities, noting that Intel Company is the biggest private employer in Israel, with more than 7,000 employees.
Following Facebook’s slow response in closing the internet page calling for a “third Intifada” and a violent protest against Israel, Facebook managers clarified that in the future they intend to deactivate any pages preaching violence. They also stated Facebook plans to open a marketing center in Israel.
[…]
It is all becoming a family event with David Fischer, Facebook’s Jewish VP of Advertising and Global Operations being non-else than the son of the Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer!
See also the Youtube clip from March 6, 2012 “President of Israel Peres speaks with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on Internet technology”.
In the introduction fellow Jew David Fischer sees it as “a real pleasure” “to welcome one of the great leaders of our times, President of Israel, Shimon Peres”. Fischer continous his hymn to the Zionist war criminal: “But what is most impressive […] is that he is a man always looking forward, a man with boundless energy, inspired many passions […].”
(Click on photo below to go to clip):
Israeli President Shimon Peres and Facebook’s David Fischer and Sheryl Sandberg
[Back to top of document]
Mark Zuckerberg (left) with fellow Jewish Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (center)
First Facebook user has joined the IDF
A quite telling detail is that the first real user of Facebook, apart from the co-founders, is a Jew, Arie Hasit (who carries the Facebook URL id 7). Hasit studied with Zuckerberg in Harvard and later on did what the Jews call Aliyah to Israel, that is he settled in occupied Palestine in accordance to the Jewish Law of Return. Hasit has since joined the Israel Defense Forces Spokespersons Unit, a propaganda/desinformation unit of the IDF.
The Israeli paper Ha´aretz ran a piece on Hasit and Facebook 10/05/2009 (underlines below added by Radio Islam):
Facebook founder’s roommate recounts creation of Internet giant
By Guy Grimland, Ha´aretz Correspondent
Five years ago, hardly anybody had heard of Facebook. Today, it seems that there is nobody in Israel or the world over who is not familiar with the social networking Web site, which recently crossed the 200 million user threshold. Facebook is estimated to be worth $15 billion after Microsoft bought 1.6 percent stock in the company for $240 million.
Arie Hasit, 26, witnessed the birth of Facebook. He shared the same apartment as Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, joined the same college fraternity, and witnessed first-hand the company’s initial climb from a dormitory start-up to a dominant mega-monstrosity on the Web.
Hasit grew up in Philadelphia. Since he was young, he dreamed of immigrating to Israel, which he did two years ago. Today he is serving in the Israel Defense Forces Spokespersons Unit. He chose to enlist for a year-and-a-half rather than the six months which are required of new immigrants in his age bracket. Israel is not foreign to him.
“Every summer I was in Jewish summer camp in the U.S. From time to time I would visit Israel.”
After completing high school at age 18, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied the history of the Land of Israel. “I thought this would make it easier for me after I would get to Israel,” Hasit said. “My parents actually thought I should learned computers so that I would work in high-tech when I got here.”
Hasit focused his studies on the hip-hop genre in Israel, a subject which would become the topic of his thesis. He met Mark Zuckerberg in 2002 after they had joined the same fraternity which primarily concentrated on activities within the Jewish community.
“We ate Shabbat dinner together,” Hasit said. “Every year we raised money for charities in Israel. Mark was one of the members of the fraternity, like many other Jewish students at Harvard.”
Hasit, who wears a skullcap, says the 25-year-old Zuckerberg feels an affinity with Judaism. “He fasts on Yom Kippur,” Hasit says of Zuckerberg. “Sometimes he would come to the Hillel House, a Jewish organization that ran various activities.”
Hasit and Zuckerberg struck up a friendship, though they were not the closest of friends. They later lived together in the college dorms.
“Mark just happened to live in the apartment where I lived in the dorms,” Hasit said. “He was in one room while I was in the other. This was a large apartment, we were seven students crammed into five bedrooms. We saw each other every day for a number of hours. When Mark moved into the dorms I was already in my third year while he was in his second year.”
Hasit says that Zuckerberg decided one day to build a Web site that would serve as a utility for students at Harvard. “He built the site for fun,” Hasit says. “We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures, or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was ‘hotter’ and according to the votes there would be a ranking.”
“He only ranked people who received the most votes for being good looking, not everybody,” Hasit said. “There were about 1,000 people in all. Within four, five hours the site became so popular that at one point it became impossible to surf the Web on Harvard’s Internet server. This was on a Sunday in October 2003.”
“The next day, the head of the university denied Zuckerberg access to the Internet. People complained that Mark used their pictures without permission. He apologized and ultimately the university decided not to expel him even though there were columns in the campus newspaper that argued that what he did was completely improper.”
Zuckerberg’s stunt came at a time when students were appealing to the university to develop a Web site that would include the pictures and contact details of students in dorms. Now they feared that the Zuckerberg episode would compel the administration to shelve the idea.
“Mark heard these pleas and decided that if the university won’t do something about it, he will, and he would build a site that would be even better than what the university had planned,” Hasit said. “Before founding Facebook, he built the site Course Match which allowed students to find out who among those living in the same dorm are taking what courses, so that they could form study groups.”
Zuckerberg started developing Facebook from his modest dorm room. Every visitor who registered at the site received a serial number. The first, second, and third user who registered took up dummy pages. The fourth user was Zuckerberg himself.
The fifth user is Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who also served as the company’s spokesperson. Dustin Moskovitz, the third part of the site’s founding triumvirate, occupies the sixth user spot. Moskovitz led the technical staff at Facebook before quitting the company to found a start-up in 2008.
Hasit’s is the seventh registered user, which in practice makes him the fourth real user to log into Facebook. “Often people ask me how I became the fourth user. Sometimes I tell them.”
“Mark came to me on the day he built Facebook, and he said to me, ‘Arie, I built this site. I want you to sign up.’ And that is how I signed up to Facebook. I put a favorite quote of mine in the profile. I specified my favorite books, which courses I take at Harvard. I uploaded one picture to the profile. There was no Wall. There was no News Feed. There weren’t too many things in Facebook, which only began its lifespan on the Web.
“Initially Zuckerberg asked a small group of people to sign up to Facebook. At a certain point he told us to start inviting friends, and that is what we did on the first and second day which the site went up on the Web. We could only invite students enrolled at Harvard. In fact, if you did not have a Harvard e-mail address you could not sign into Facebook. At first, dozens of Harvard students registered. The numbers then reached the hundreds, and by the fourth day it had already reached the thousands. People were very enthusiastic about the site. It enabled them to know who took what courses and to meet new people. It conquered Harvard. In less than a week, some 4,000 students signed up for Facebook.”
Hasit recalls how Zuckerberg spent hours in front of the computer. “He studied computers and psychology,” Hasit said. “Despite the fact that he developed Facebook, he continued his studies as per usual. His grades were okay. He was even in a relationship with a girlfriend. During Facebook’s initial days, the walls in his room were filled with graphs and charts which showed how many people joined on a daily basis, who used what application, and who has the most friends.”
“After a few weeks, he decided to open up Facebook to another university. He had two friends, one at Stanford and the other at Dartmouth, whom he asked to promote the site there. He also asked for help from his ex-girlfriend who was a student at Dartmouth.”
Facebook quickly attracted a following in other leading universities. “Every user specified which university he belonged to, and that was how he kept in touch with other students at the university in which he studied, but all the networks were under one Web site.”
“The graphs and charts in his room became graphs and charts which included statistics from all the universities. At one point he received requests from students at other universities who were not in Facebook to open the site to them as well.
Summary
So we now know that the Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, “feels an affinity with Judaism” and has “raised money for charities in Israel”.
In Facebook´s early history Zuckerberg was assisted by the Jew Dustin Moskovitz and got funding from Jewish businessman Peter Thiel, the latter a man with open Zionist views and in contact with the Zionist establishment. Thiel then joined the Board of Facebook and is presently – according to The Guardian – “the real face behind Facebook”.
Other top namnes are co-Board member Jim Breyer and the Jewess Sheryl Sandberg, the “second-in-command of Facebook”.
And one of Zuckerberg´s friends from Harvard – his roommate and Facebook´s first real user – has since moved to Israel and joined the Israel Defense Forces Spokespersons Unit. This also reveals the mindset of people in Zuckerberg´s proximity.
Knowing this one is not surprised thet the arch-Zionist Shimon Peres invited Zuckerberg to Israel in 2008.
We here give links to more information on Facebook:
- The Guardian on the Jews behind Facebook
Guardian article that gives some idea about the people behind Facebook, including the Jewish moneyman Peter Thiel - Jewish Internet Defense Force ‘seizes control’ of anti-Israel Facebook group
article from The Jerusalem Post
Wikipedia
What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is an Internet encyclopedia that anyone can edit and add information.
Wikipedia claims its articles are based on a “neutral point of view” but as it is human beings writing the articles, of course the contents quickly have been mixed up with politics. For instance organization like CIA have tried to affect the entries (see BBC:s “Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits’ “), and big companies try to control the information on themselves. And Israel and its army of “cyber-soldier” Jews from all over the world are now doing the same…
The Wikipedia project has ended into control of student research on the Internet.
The situation is now that the majority of subjects Googled will show Wikipedia as the top – or one of the firts top results – and thus Wikipedia will get the majority of the hits.
And as shown in our section on Google this Internet search-engine is well in the hands of Zionist Jews and also cooperates openly with Zionist organizations such as ADL and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) to control the searches and censoring information and certain sites.
This means that apart from Wikipedia other sites may be censored when Googling any given subject.
 Larry Sanger |
Wikipedia´s Jewish founders – Wales and Sanger
From all the available information it appears Wikipedia was started by two Jews, one a programmer, and the other an ‘Adult Site’ operator.
The origins are in a project called Nupedia launched in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
The Jew Jimmy Wales (actually James Wales, or also known as “Jimbo”), with riches from his time as an options trader, became an Internet entrepreneur and decided to create a free, online encyclopedia. He recruited the Jew Larry Sanger, who was finishing a Ph.D. in philosophy at the Ohio State University – whom Wales knew from their joint participation in online mailing lists and Usenet discussion groups – to become the paid editor in chief. Wales’s company Bomis, an Internet search portal and a vendor of online “erotic images” (featuring the Bomis Babe Report), picked up the tab initially.
The Jewish computer programmer Ben Kovitz is the one who suggested to Larry Sanger, Nupedia’s editor-in-chief, to transfer the online encyclopedia to a wiki support. Larry and Jimmy Wales accepted and from that time, Wikipedia took over Nupedia and became a huge success.
Larry Sanger, one of the two recognized cofounders, is openly Jewish. In their rabblings of what different famous Jews are doing The Jewish Chronicle mentions Sanger in an article “Larry Sanger… creates a new Wikipedia”, The Jewish Chronicle, 26 October 2006, p. 10.
Wales is presently in charge. Sanger left in 2002, and is a professor/lecturer at Ohio State.
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales History
Jimmy Wales is the de facto leader of Wikipedia and as thus wields a lot of influence. Time Magazine named him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.
Short history: Wales who was born in Huntsville, Alabama, went to the exclusive Randolph prep school, and onto the University of Alabama. Wales graduated and became a Futures Trader in Chicago. Next he opened Bomis, an ‘Adult Content’ website, which was followed by Nupedia, which morphed into Wikipedia.
Wales is the darling of the Jewish crowd at Harvard, being a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at the Harvard Law School.
What is Bomis.Com?
Basically ‘Bomis’ is an adult site, started by Wales.
The website featured user-generated webrings and that, according to The Atlantic Monthly (September 2006), “found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet”. For a time the company sold erotic photographs, and Wales described the site as a “guy-oriented search engine”.
 Jimmy Wales with Bomis babes |
 a Bomis babe – financing Wikipedia |
Jewish employees
Names like Jeremy Rosenfeld (a Bomis employee), Benjamin Kovitz, Seth Cohen, dot the landscape of technical staff.
Wales´ editing interventions
It should here be noted that although Wikipedia states that it professes a “neutral point of view” the on-line dictionary has even seen direct interventions from its owner Jimmy Wales over its contents. The Herald Sun reports June 30, 2009, in the article “Wikipedia edits helped free David Rohde“:
THE New York Times worked with Wikipedia to keep news of the kidnapping of one of its reporters in Afghanistan off the online user-edited encyclopedia.
New York Times reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped by the Taliban in November, escaped from his captors along with his translator this month.
A number of news organisations, including Agence France-Presse, at the request of the New York Times, agreed not to report the kidnapping out of concerns for their safety.
Keeping the news off Wikipedia was another matter, the Times said.
It said that on at least a dozen occasions, user-editors posted news of the abduction on a Wikipedia page about Mr Rohde, only to have it erased.
Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing, it said.
“The sanitising was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at the Times,” the newspaper said.
“We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” Mr Wales told the Times.
“I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”
The Times said that two days after the November 10 kidnapping, Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at the Times and friend of Mr Rohde, altered Mr Rohde’s Wikipedia entry to emphasise that his work could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantanamo and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims.
It said that the next day, an unidentified user, citing an Afghan news agency report, edited the entry on Mr Rohde and mentioned the kidnapping.
Mr Moss deleted the mention, and the user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal, the Times said.
It said the Times eventually reached out to Wales and Wikipedia put an indefinite block and then a temporary freeze on changes to the page.
“We had no idea who it was,” Mr Wales said of the unidentified user making the edits.
He said there was no indication the user had ill-intent.
The Times said Mr Wales himself unfroze the page after the June 19 escape by Mr Rohde and his interpreter, Tahir Ludin.
Interesting here is to see that people should be kept in the dark of the “security deterioration” and the realites of what is happening in occupied Afghanistan. Instead Wikipedia will help in sanitising the image.
Addendum 2011:
Wikipedia´s Jimmy Wales at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem on Oct. 22, 2009 together with the Jewish war criminal Shimon Peres. Note writing inHebrew behind Wales.
The same was repeated in 2011, with Wales again going to Israel for the Israeli Presidential Conference. Read for instance the article from The Jewish Telegraphic Agency dated June 22, 2011.
Above – Jimmy Wales on the stage – Israeli Presidential Conference 2011.
Wales has also run the annual 3-day Wikipedia meeting, the so-called Wikimaniaevent, in Haifa in Israel. Please read for instance The Jewish Chronicle article dated August 5, 2011: “Wikimania hits Israel as conference opens” Read also the article from the Wikimedia blog dated August 3, 2011: “Shalom from Wikimania 2011!“
Wikipedia´s Jimmy Wales and Israeli war criminal and President Shimon Peres together with Israeli-Jewish bloggers in Israel, 2011.
|
 Wikimedia Director Sue Gardner in Israel 2009 |
Wikipedia chief Gardner goes to Israel – gets advice
Israeli paper Ha´aretz reports 04/05/2009 on how Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, has participated at a meeting in Israel – a Wikipedia Academy 2009 Conference – organized by Wikimedia´s Israeli supporters and Tel Aviv University’s Netvision Institute for Internet Studies. Ha´aretz writes:
Wikipedia editors: Coverage of Israel ‘problematic’
By Cnaan Liphshiz
Wikipedia’s coverage of Israel-related issues is “problematic,” leading Israeli internet researchers claimed Sunday at the Wikipedia Academy 2009 Conference dealing with the world’s largest encyclopedia. The conference was organized by Wikimedia’s volunteer-based Israel chapter and Tel Aviv University’s Netvision Institute for Internet Studies. However, the Web site’s leading manager said it merely reflected public discourse.
In demonstrating what he defined as problems, Eli Hacohen, the Institute’s director, showed how Hamas is not defined as a terrorist organization in the first paragraph describing the organization on the English site of the reader-edited online encyclopedia, which is the world’s fourth most popular Web site.
Hacohen also documented his attempts to define Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a Holocaust-denier. Each time he included his remarks on Wikipedia, users and editors removed the reference – despite Ahmadinejad’s frequent and public Holocaust denials.
On a related entry, Hacohen also noted that Wikipedia defines David Irving – a known Holocaust denier – as a historian, although his credentials are recognized by no one but himself. Furthermore, the Wikipedia entry on January’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza describes it as an “intense bombardment” by Israel on a civilian population.
Dror Kamir, a leading Israeli Wikipedia promoter, showed how Lod is not listed as a city in Israel in Wikipedia’s Arabic-language version.
Also attending the conference, which discussed Wikipedia’s role in academia, was Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. Gardner told Haaretz that she is “quite comfortable” with the mistakes on the Web site. “I know that more or less the same mistakes can be found in the New York Times,” she explained.
Before her address at the conference, she defined Wikipedia as a “just another mainstream news medium.” Wikipedia, Gardner said, “will never say anything as Wikipedia. It will only quote relatively well-respected sources, including other media. So it’s natural for Wikipedia to reflect public discourse as it fluctuates, and news is the first draft of history.”
On her first visit to Israel, Gardner explained that her attitude stemmed from her framework of reference as a journalist in her native Canada, including a stint as director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Web site.
The boss of Wikipedia thus travels down to the land of the chosen people to be lectured on how Wikipedia can be improved when it divulges information concerning Israel/Jews.
For a collection of images from this event beteween Wikipedia and Israel, see this link:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Academy_Israel_2009
Sue Gardner in Israel 2009, Eli Hacohen to the right
Wikipedia leading editor also goes to Israel
David Shankbone, leading editor at Wikipedia, has been invited by the Israeli Government´s Foreign Ministry to help polish Israel´s image:
Photo Editing Israel’s Online Image
By Sharon Udasin, Staff Writer
The Jewish Week, 03/04/2009[…]
But David Saranga, the media consul for the Consulate General of Israel in New York, plans to fight back. After launching a pro-Israel campaign through Twitter.com during the Gaza war and by bringing Maxim magazine into Israel last year, he says he is recruiting the best in the business to revamp Israel’s online image.In just a few weeks, he will bring six American new media experts to photograph Israel, with funds from the Consulate and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
[…]
However, Saranga says the initiative will, hopefully, knock the pictures of destruction much further down the lists, behind photos of ordinary Israeli daily life. And because he has enlisted Internet authorities like pen-named Wikipedia senior editor David Shankbone, Saranga thinks that there is a good chance they’ll stay that way.Shankbone — whose real name is David Miller — first visited Israel in December 2007, when Saranga led a group of journalists on a tour of the country’s high-tech and environmental developments. All in all Shankbone estimates that he illustrates over 4,000 Wikipedia articles with his photography.
“The idea is to create a body of work that not only Wikipedia can use but that the general public can use,” he said.
Shankbone is not Jewish, but he said he learned extensively about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in school. While he considers himself a supporter of Israel, Shankbone doesn’t intend to make Wikipedia a Zionist Web site, and he looks at the Gaza war as a black-and-white situation — Israel had a right to respond, but its mode of attack was not without fault.
Yet for Shankbone, the purpose of his photo expedition is not to document the aftermath of the war.
“People want to talk to you about other things than just missiles,” he said.
Ideally, Shankbone said he’d like to end up at solar power plants in the Negev Desert or in a southern city like Eilat, because he spent most of his time up north during the previous trip.
“I particularly like small towns, because my feeling is that anyone can come to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” Shankbone said.
While on open-source sites, users can add and remove other people’s contributions as they see fit, only an administrator can permanently delete the posts from the storage database, Wikimedia Commons. In his three years working as a Wikipedia editor, however, Shankbone said that he has been careful to avoid inserting his own political positions, and readers have rarely altered his content. His collection remains the largest Creative Commons — a Web-based data-sharing platform — photograph community generated by one person, he said.
[…]
Critic Oboler, however, questions whether “bringing out people like Shankbone will help directly with the grass-roots, anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic activity that occurs online.”“What it will do is help in the fight for hearts and minds online,” he said. “This proactive engagement is also important.”
“It certainly isn’t going to be the silver bullet,” Shankbone agreed. “It does give Wikipedia the opportunity or responsibility to present accuracy.”
And while Saranga hopes to change the world’s perception of Israel in the long term with the support of every American Israel consulate, he recognizes that, realistically, results will not be immediate.
“At the end of the day, a single activity won’t change perceptions; a single activity won’t change the criticism generated by the Gaza war,” he said. “But what is important is to create a critical mass of positive activities that will improve Israel’s image.”
The Jerusalem Post writes on the same story:
Leading Wikipedia editor to visit Israel
By Herb Keinon
The Jerusalem Post, Dec 8, 2007
In an acknowledgement of the importance that the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has in shaping opinion, the Foreign Ministry is bringing one of its leading editors, David Shankbone, to Israel next week.
World According to a communiqué put out by the ministry, Shankbone has carried out dozens of interviews of US personalities for Wikipedia, including presidential candidates, religious leaders, rock stars and journalists. Shankbone will be visiting within the framework of a delegation of technology writers being brought to Israel by the Foreign Ministry and the America-Israel Friendship League.
Explaining the rationale for bringing Shankbone to Israel, David Saranga, the spokesman at the consulate in New York, said: “More than once we have faced editors connected to Israel that appear on Wikipedia in English that do not represent the reality in Israel. We decided to initiate a visit by Shankbone to describe Israeli reality as it is.”
Wikipedia, according to the Foreign Ministry, is the eighth largest web site in the world, with some 60 million visitors a day, or some 14,000 hits a second.
David Shankbone – whose real name is David Miller – has himself written on his trip in his private user page in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Shankbone/Israel):
Israel I went to Israel to expand Wikipedia’s quality photographic representation and coverage of Israeli-related articles. My trip was reported on in their press:
- Jerusalem Post
- The official blog of Israel
- Haaretz
I also wrote a series of articles about the trip for Wikinews. I interviewed their President, Shimon Peres, had lunch with the President of the Technion and discussed the philosophy of Wikipedia over dinner with Yossi Vardi. Here is the first one.
And if you have a chance—check out Solar power in Israel, which I recently wrote.
Below is a gallery of images I took on the trip.
And here is a nice picture of Shankbone-Miller with Shimon Peres:
Wikipedia´s David Shankbone (Miller) with Israeli war criminal Shimon Peres – the man behind the
Qana massacre of over 100 Lebanese civilians in 1996
Shankbone´s interview with Peres appeared in the Israeli paper Yedioth Aharonoth (here part of the article, reproduced from the Israeli government site http://www.isrealli.org/ – isRealli – The New Blog of the State of Israel):
WikiPeres
By Itamar Eichner
Yedioth Aharonoth, 24 December 2007, p.12
A President with Value: Peres is the First Leader to Be Interviewed for Wikipedia’s News Site
The nation’s president proved again yesterday that despite his advanced age he has no need to be embarrassed facing politicians much younger than he. Shimon Peres is the first world leader to grant an interview to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
The interview with Peres will be published on the Wikipedia news site, Wikinews and his statements will be integrated into various articles throughout the encyclopedia.
For over an hour, Peres sat with one of the Wikipedia senior editors, David Shankbone. Shankbone, who came to Israel with a delegation of journalists, turned to the Israeli Consul for Media and Public Affairs in New York, David Saranga, and asked to schedule an interview with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Peres. To Shankbone’s surprise, it was Peres who decided to take up the gauntlet and grant an interview to the popular encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the eighth most-popular website in the world in terms of daily traffic.
At the outset of the interview, Shankbone told Peres, “We checked among Internet surfers under age 30 and we found that you are the most popular and most recognizable leader in the world.”
Peres used the interview for a bitter attack on Iran. “The Iranian economy cannot support the atomic program,” he said, “and the world must decide if it is ready for nuclear weapons to fall into terrorists’ hands.”
Peres was asked his opinion of the younger generation of Israelis. “The 14- 15- and 16-year-olds need to participate in determining the world’s future,” the President explained. “If it were up to adults, they would want kids to keep dancing the hora or singing Slavic songs, but youngsters don’t listen and should not have to. Young women today also wear more risqué clothing than they did in the past and there is no problem with that since they look nicer.” Consul Saranga said last night “It was important for the Foreign Ministry that part of the interview was dedicated to subjects other than the conflict [with the Palestinians].”
The interview has since appeared in Wikinews – “the free news source” – as it was destined to be, and can be read at: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_discusses_the_future_of_Israel
Shankbone-Miller to return to Israel
In his own blog 2008/07/31 Shankbone-Miller writes that he will return to Israel (http://blog.shankbone.org/2008/07/31/david-shankbone-to-go-back-to-israel-for-wikimedia/):
David Shankbone to go back to Israel for Wikimedia
By David Shankbone
Last December I traveled to Israel where I had lunch with Yitzhak Apeloig, the president of their premiere university, the Technion, and interviewed their President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shimon Peres (photo, right).
In the next few months I will be returning to the Holy Land for a week-long photography expedition. From the students of Haifa to the dolphins of Eilat; from the vineyards of the Galillee to the Bedouins of The Negev; I will engage in a photographic documentary of the people and landscape of Israel. The goal is to create a comprehensive body of images of the country that are licensed as free content, meaning my work will be available to everyone via Wikimedia for both commercial and non-commercial uses.
Watch this blog for updates.
In his own blog 2009/03/04 Shankbone writes more on his new Israel trip, where he will be joined by “baroness of social media, Tamar Weinberg, and her photographer husband”. “Consul David Saranga in the Israeli Foreign Ministry […] was instrumental in putting the trip together” (http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/03/04/my-israel-trip-covered-in-jewish-week/):
My Israel trip covered in Jewish Week
By David Shankbone
Sharon Udasin recently wrote in Jewish Week about my upcoming photography expedition of Israel for the creative commons. Also on the plane will be the baroness of social media, Tamar Weinberg, and her photographer husband. The itinerary is not set, but I have requested an interview for Wikinews. Because the focus is on photography, most of my writing will take place on this blog where I hope to document the experience. Consul David Saranga in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, who has spear-headed his country’s foray into social media, was instrumental in putting the trip together.
My goal here will be to document not just the monuments and public structures that every tourist documents, but also common, every-day features of life and landscape. Cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are not crying out for free media (although they can always use more professional-quality shots). Instead, places like the Arava Valley, the kiryats and the kibbutzes need coverage.
I want to capture life outside the scope of a rifle. That not every Israeli is armed, living in rubble or dodging missiles is lost in a media narrative that filters everything through conflict. The hope is to obtain shots of the country not typically obtained by tourists and photojournalists. Small town and rural Israel holds all the appeal for me.
More tricks to control information in Wikipedia
But corrupting the very top names of Wikipedia for Israel´s cause is not enough. Jewish students, paid by Hasbara fellowships from the Israeli government, are mobilized to edit Wikipedia in a pro-Israel manner.
The images and text below are from a Hasbara newsletter dated May 2007.
Hasbara is an Israeli institution that gives fellowships to Jewish students around the world and also aids them in organizing “Israel Advocacy”, i.e. Israel-propaganda.
We also recommend reading the following articles:
 Jimmy Wales counting the bucks |
- A pro-Israel group’s plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia
CAMERA orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia - Wikipedia joins the “censor game”
example on how Jewish Internet activists work to delete information they dislike - Online Censorship by Israel – What do BLOGGER, YOUTUBE, FACEBOOK,
and WIKIPEDIA have in common? – external link
by Irish4Palestine, 21/02/2009 - Foreign Ministry out to “conquer” internet
article from Israeli YNet site on a Israeli government photo offensive on Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr - Photo Editing Israel’s Online Image
Israel´s government invites Wikipedia editor Shankbone to help with pro-Israelization of Wikipedia
Yahoo!
Yahoo Jew Terry Semel
Yahoo! in Jewish hands
The Jew Terry Semel was CEO of the search engine company Yahoo! between 2001 and 2007.
During his time as Yahoo! CEO Semel used his position to impress on his fellow Jews. For instance Semel in the shape of Yahoo-boss appeared as one of the main speakers at the Jewish Community Federation in San Fransisco´s meeting, January 25, 2006, according to the organization´s homepage (http://www.sfjcf.org/aboutJCF/photos/album/default.asp?album=blcbreakfast-jan2006&page=1):
300 JCF donors gathered at the Julia Morgan Ballroom to kibbitz and build a Jewish network of business professionals. Featured speaker Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel gave an engaging, personal talk, sharing his views on philanthropy and leadership.
 Terry Semel speaks at Jewish Community Federation in San Fransisco |
The Jewish site Jweekly.com writes on the event:
Yahoo CEO talks of philanthropy, teamwork at JCF event
Friday, February 17, 2006
By Maureen Earl, correspondent
With more than 420 million users around the world, Yahoo can claim a high spot on the Internet echelon. But it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the Sunnyvale-based company.
When Yahoo’s chairman and CEO, Jewish Brooklyn native Terry Semel, first arrived at the company in 2001, it had just lost $98 million on revenue of $717 million. Semel was determined to put Yahoo back in the black.
His strategy worked. Last year Yahoo earned $1.2 billion on sales of $5.3 billion — and those 420 million users aren’t bad, either.
On Jan. 25 Semel addressed 300 donors to the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation who gathered for the JCF’s first Business Leadership Council breakfast.
Semel, once one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and now one of the most commanding leaders in Internet technology, started the keynote address by announcing that he was not a morning person.
“I prefer to take an hour to reflect and catch up in the morning,” he said.
Soft-spoken but authoritative, Semel discussed the importance of philanthropy in business. “Business and philanthropy go hand in hand,” he said. “I came from a lower-income family in Brooklyn, yet by the age of 10 or 12 I’d already been taught the importance of giving.
“You need to start kids off that young so that it becomes a habit. To accomplish things you also have to give. At first maybe with time, then later with money, and eventually even both if you are able.”At the age of 10 it was a dollar from his allowance; today, Semel no longer thinks on a small scale.
“I now think in terms of hundreds of millions,” he said, “but the same principles apply whether it’s a two-person philanthropy organization or a giant like Yahoo.”
Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is how Semel operates both in philanthropy and business. He recalled how, as an ambitious young man working as a sales trainee at Warner Bros. in the mid-1960s, his boss would arrive shouting and yelling at all and sundry.
“There and then I decided I would not do that. How people are treated is vital.”
Semel, who graduated in 1964 with an accounting degree from Long Island University, went on to become chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. During his 24-year career there, Semel and his business partner, Robert Daly, helped shape the company into one of the world’s largest media outlets, generating nearly $11 billion in total revenue from businesses in 50 countries.
In 1999, Semel and Daly pressed their hands into wet concrete outside Hollywood’s legendary Mann’s Chinese Theater. With the executives thus immortalized in Hollywood lore, the ceremony marked the last day of work for the two at Warner Bros.
In May 2001, after an 18-month hiatus, Semel joined Yahoo as CEO and chairman immediately after the dot-com collapse in Silicon Valley.
“I was looking for a challenge. I didn’t take the position for the money,” he said.
Whether he was looking for it or not, Semel has netted $403 million by exercising Yahoo options and selling shares. He still owns shares and options worth more than $230 million.
The credit of Yahoo’s success, Semel said, goes to his staff and their practiced team ability.
“It’s always about team. No one wins if it rests on one star athlete. The superstar ideal will not get you to the Super Bowl, it’s not sustainable. It has to be the team. And we [at Yahoo] actually like each other — we love the challenge.”
Last year Yahoo added 220 people a month and now employs about 10,000. Daniel Rosensweig, Yahoo’s chief operating officer, said, “Terry’s a Brooklynite at heart. He expects a new fight every day.”
One of the biggest challenges Semel faces is adapting the company to fit its users’ ever-changing preferences.
“The big change in technology is that we used to have someone else program everything for us,” he said. “Someone else programmed television, so you watched what was on when it was on. Internet has turned the user into programmers — we want what we want, when we want, and we get it.”
On Friday evenings, Semel boards his private jet in Sunnyvale and returns to his family and home in Bel Air for the weekend. There he is able to relax for a couple of days knowing that he has helped grow Yahoo into a company that has the widest global reach of any Internet site.
Not shabby for a man who, prior to joining Yahoo, had rarely gone near a computer.
Semel may constantly redirect attention to his team, but he is very much an individual. “I would not have succeeded had I not been true to myself. I never wanted to be the guy who looks back and says ‘I wish I’d done this, done that,'” he said.
Summing up Semel´s pre-Yahoo! career
Prior to Yahoo! – as stated in the article above – Semel worked in Hollywood where he spent 24 years at Warner Bros. As its chairman and co-chief executive officer, Semel and his partner built the company into one of the world’s largest entertainment enterprises. Prior to Warner Bros., Semel was in charge of Walt Disney’s Theatrical Distribution division and he has also been in charge of CBS’ Theatrical Distribution division.
Terry Semel is a friend of Arnon Milchan, the Jewish Hollywood producer with Mossad connections, and was one of the invited att Milchan´s Israel party 2008, a party co-organized by the Israeli consulate (The Jewish Journal, September 25, 2008).
Other Yahoo! Jews
The Israeli Jew Andrei Broder, a graduate from Israel´s Technion Institute, is Vice President for Search & Computational Advertising at Yahoo! Research. Broder also serves as Chief Scientist of Yahoo’s Advertising Technology Group. He has previously worked for AltaVista as the Vice President of research and for IBM Research as a Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM’s Institute for Search and Text Analysis.
David Goldberg was Vice President and General Manager of Music at Yahoo! Inc., since the acquisition of LAUNCH Media, Inc. by Yahoo! in August 2001. David Goldberg is married to and has kids withSheryl Sandberg, the Jewish Internet boss formerly with Google and presently “second-in-command” in Facebook (see our long entry on her in our Google section).
Goldberg left Yahoo! in 2007.
The Israeli engineer Udi Manber, also a graduate from the Israeli Technion Institute and who we portray in more depth in our section on Google, was chief scientist at Yahoo! from 1998 to 2002. Manber then joined Amazon.com where he became “chief algorithms officer” and a Vice President. He was later appointed CEO of the Amazon subsidiary company A9.com, where he led the company’s A9 search engine work. In 2006, he was hired by Google as one of their Vice Presidents of engineering.
Addendum 2012: The Jew Dan Rosensweig was the chief operating officer (COO) of Yahoo! Inc. from 2002 to 2007. He later became CEO at Guitar Hero and then at Chegg.
 Andrei Broder
|
 David Goldberg |
Udi Manber |
 Dan Rosensweig |
Yahoo! and Israel
Semel was in Israel during the festive events 2008, celebrating Israel´s 60th anniversary. Semel appeared as a speaker on Shimon Peres’ “President’s Conference” in Israel May 15, on the topic “The Revolution of the Internet and the new media”, together with Google´s Jewish co-founder and President Sergey Brin. Semel was here to represent his post-Yahoo! company Windsor Media, where he is chairman and CEO.
Susan Decker, the present President of Yahoo! Inc., also attended and spoke at the 2008 Israel conference. Decker is the person that took over the Presidency over Yahoo! directly after Semel.
The Israeli paper Ha´aretz writes:
Facebook, Google founders to attend Jerusalem conference in May
By Guy Grimland, Ha´aretz Correspondent
Ha´aretz 01/04/2008
Co-founder of internet giant Google, Sergey Brin, will join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Yahoo president Susan Decker at a presidential panel on technology to be held at the Jerusalem International Convention Center May 13-15.
The convention, which was formed at the initiative of President Shimon Peres, will also be attended by a number of Israeli political, religious and financial leaders, as well as academics and cultural figures.
The panel will discuss issues facing technology in today’s age and the future, in particular in regard to how it will affect Israel and the Jewish world.
Former UK prime minister Tony Blair will also take part in the conference, as will French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former prime minister of the Czech Republic Vaclev Havel, Nobel Prize Laureate Eli Wiesel, and Georgia President Michael Saakashvili
Other Zionist participants at the meeting were Rupert Murdoch and Maurice Levy, the latter a powerful French Jew with enormous might in the advertisement/publicity business (Publicis, Saatchi & Saatchi), and a man very dedicated to promoting Israel´s image.
The meeting was moderated by Israel´s “technology guru” Yossi Vardi, whom Yahoo! already had business dealings with (see below).
The “President’s Conference” figured other speeches by staunch Zionists such as Israel´s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and “American” agents of Israel such as Dennis Ross and Henry Kissinger.
And the collaboration between Yahoo! and Israel deepens
Here follows three Ha´aretz articles on the subject.
Yahoo! President Susan Decker takes interest in Israel
By Haaretz Staff and Channel 10, May 18, 2008
Susan Decker, the president of Yahoo! Incorporated, visited Jerusalem last week to attend the 2008 Presidential Conference.
Decker oversees one of the most popular Web sites in the world, with more than 400 million page views daily. She is the second highest paid female executive in the United States, with 14,000 people working under her.
Decker suggests that Yahoo! exemplifies the fact that the glass ceiling she was spared is a thing of the past.
Internet giant Yahoo! to follow rivals Google, Microsoft to Israel
By Raz Smolsky and Maayan Cohen
Ha´aretz 14/01/2008
Internet giant Yahoo! is coming to Israel, and not only over the Net. The company is taking its battle for survival against Google and Microsoft to Israel on two levels. It will open a research and development center in Haifa, and will also enter the content side of the business here for the first time through a cooperation agreement with Walla!, which is partly owned by Haaretz.
Yahoo! is following Google, which set up R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Haifa, as well as establishing a marketing center that also deals in joint content arrangements with Israeli portals. Microsoft, meanwhile, has set up a sales and marketing branch in Ra’anana, as well as R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Herzliya.
Yahoo! is now negotiating office space in the Matam high-tech park in Haifa; and is expected to open its research center within a few months.
Google kicked off in the Middle East with its Haifa R&D center in July 2006, despite the Second Lebanon War at the time; the center was its first in the region and only its fourth outside of the U.S. Other well-known companies in the Matam industrial park include Intel, Microsoft, Elbit and Zim.
Yahoo!’s first foray into the Israeli content market is based on a strategic deal signed with portal Walla!. The goal is to threaten Google’s hegemony in the Israeli search market for the first time and the real challenge is to compete in search-based advertising.
Under the long-term deal signed between Yahoo! and Walla!, the technology and databases will come from Yahoo!, but the search engine will be branded as Walla! Search, the name of Walla!’s present engine.
Only six months ago there were reports that Walla! was negotiating with Google in the search market, but no agreement was ever reached. Google usually partners with a local search engine by providing the technology and the advertisements, while the revenues are split.
The joint Walla!-Yahoo! venture will continue using Walla!’s AdVantage platform. This will allow Walla! to continue to manage the advertising itself, and it will receive a higher percentage of the revenues than in a deal that also included advertising, such as Google proposed.
According to Walla! CEO Ilan Yeshua: “The search and advertising in search results sector is one of the fastest growing in the world, and also in Israel. The agreement with Yahoo! allows us to offer Walla!’s surfers an excellent search product … for the Israeli user. The agreement will help Walla! increase its market share in the search-based advertising market. The existence of another strong player in the search and textual advertising sector will contribute to competitiveness , both in the search experience and in the range of possibilities available to advertisers.”
Yahoo! and Walla! had previously discussed technological cooperation in the past, but nothing serious came of it. Walla!’s previous management, replaced in 2006, was never willing to allow outsiders to share its advertising revenues.
Israeli Internet advertising was estimated at $90 million in 2007, 10% of the total advertising pie. Of this figure, search engine advertising took about half, $40-50 million, the large majority of which went to Google.
Yahoo buys no-sales FoxyTunes for $40m
By Guy Griml
Ha´aretz, February 05, 2008
Yahoo, the Internet giant that Microsoft wants to take over, is gearing up for its second Israeli investment: FoxyTunes, owned by entrepreneurs Vitaly and Alex Sirota. The exact amount has not been announced, but sources close to the situation say the company will go for between $30 million and $40 million.
The Sirota brothers, new immigrants from Russia, are the big winners in the deal, along with Yossi Vardi and a group of private investors from the United States. Initial investment in the company is estimated at just a few million, and the brothers will be raking in a total of $15 million.
[…]
“We will become part of Yahoo Entertainment, and they will distribute the FoxyTunes toolbar to as many people as possible.”
More on Jewish Internet actor Semel…
Semel is currently on the Board of Directors of Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation, Emerson College, and the Guggenheim Museum. But he still continues his favourite pastime, which he describes in a Hebrew-language interview in the Israeli The Globe, as:
I’m busy mostly with in searching for interesting companies in order to purchase and invest in, and I’m certain that they’ll be heard of in the coming years.
Terry´s daughter Courtenay Semel is also in the spotlight. The Jewish site Jewtastic writes:
Semel Reveals She Was Lohan’s First Jewish Gay Lover
By Jewtastic Staff
August 18th, 2008
Lindsay Lohan embarked on a secret lesbian affair with aspiring actress Courtenay Semel before meeting [Jewish] Samantha Ronson, it has been claimed.
Semel – the daughter of former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel – insists she was the Mean Girls star’s first gay love.
But she claims they kept their affair secret because of the actress’ fear of coming out to the world.
She said: “Everyone thinks Samantha is Lindsay’s first lesbian love, but we were very passionate until her fear of being found out drove us apart. At the time she was terrified her career would be over if she revealed her sexual tendencies. But then Samantha came on to the scene and I was dropped.”
Terry Semel doing the classic “palms-out” pose
MySpace
MySpace is a social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.
Jewish co-founders and President
The MySpace project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse’s Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace’s starting CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace’s starting President), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.
Known Jews in this lot are Anderson, Greenspan and Berman.
As one Jewish blogger writes:
The website was co-founded by Tom Anderson. Although Tom’s last name reflects his father’s Scottish heritage, he and his mother are Jewish and he was raised in a messianic Jewish household.
Josh Berman, the other Jewish co-founder of MySpace.com, also served as the company’s Chief Operating Officer.
President Tom Anderson (right) and Chris DeWolfe (left)
Jewish Vice Presidents including an Israeli paratrooper (reserves)
Another Jew, Richard Rosenblatt, was former Chairman of MySpace and thus earned the title the “MySpace guru”.
The Jew Travis Katz is presently the international head of MySpace and a senior Vice President (2009).
 Richard Rosenblatt |
|
 Josh Brooks |
Among other names as senior Vice Presidents we have Shawn Gold, the Israeli Nimrod Lev (former Israeli paratroopers and military intelligence) and Josh Brooks. Whether Steve Pearman also is Jewish, we don´t know.
Another Jew – with political insights – is Jeff Berman who joined MySpace in 2006 as Senior Vice President of Public Affairs. In 2007, Berman was promoted to General Manager of MySpaceTV (http://myspacetv.com), where he oversaw the launch of the company’s global video platform. There he cooperated with media Jews Michael Eisner, Marshall Herskovitz andEdward Zwick. In 2008 Berman was appointed Executive Vice President of Marketing and Content of MySpace, responsible for spearheading the development and implementation of marketing initiatives and campaigns for MySpace’s more than 110 million users worldwide. Berman will thus report to MySpace’s CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe.
Before joining MySpace, from 2001-2005, Berman served as Chief Counsel to the Jewish U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts.
Jeff Berman, MySpace Jew with political insights
MySpace, and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed Intermix Media) was bought in July 2005 for US$ 580 million by arch-Zionist Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation.
Murdoch is a fanatic pro-Israeli. In the Jewish magazine 15 Minutes, Issue 26, July 1, 2001, one could read:
[Murdoch] explained at a Museum of Jewish Heritage dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria that, “I have always believed in the future of Israel and the goals of the international Jewish community”.
MySpace and Israel
The Israeli paper Ha´aretz writes, January 09, 2007:
Hey, Israeli startups – MySpace wants you
By Lior Haner
Even though most Israeli entrepreneurs say they want to develop their startups into large companies, most secretly wish for generous purchase offers from abroad – and may even prefer working as senior vice presidents in an American corporation.
Both of these wishes were granted to Israeli Internet serial entrepreneur Nimrod Lev, 35, who founded KSolo in 2005, sold it last summer to Fox Interactive Media and now works as a senior vice president at Fox.
Fox Interactive is owned by the media conglomerate News Corp., and owns the popular MySpace Internet Web site. Lev is currently on a personal trip to Israel, and will be speaking at the Israel Management Center’s convention this coming Sunday, January 7, where participants will choose the 2006 high-tech CEO of the year.
Haner’s current visit is his first to Israel since selling KSolo and he does not hide his intentions to find more Israeli Internet entrepreneurs for Fox’s acquisitions department. “If there is a company can benefit FOx’s MySpace, I would rather find it in Israel than elsewhere,” explains Lev.
Despite his Israeli background and the fact that there are other Israelis who could assist companies in penetrating the American market, Lev insists that due to the cultural gaps and problems in understanding one another, any company that wants to succeed overseas needs a local presence.
This week Lev hopes to meet with representatives of several Israeli companies whose products are in their initial stages, to form ties between them and Fox. Lev believes that the next big high-tech field combines the Internet and cellular services, but he has not revealed which Israeli companies he thinks have the best potential, or with whom he is meeting. In the meantime, he has been heaping praises on the more established and familiar Internet companies, such as Jajah, Oberon Media and Quigo Technologies.
He also feels the biggest underachieving company in recent years is Babylon, the interactive dictionary developer, which Lev says could have been much more successful. During his visit, Lev will share his experience and relate the story of his ascent to the upper echelons of the American Internet industry.
Lev started out as an editor at the Israeli Internet portal Walla in 1996, a job he landed after editing the student newspaper at Tel Aviv’s College of Management.
Firing Cupid’s arrow
In 1999 Lev left Walla to join Zion Madmon, the founder of cupid.co.il, to help promote that company and develop it abroad, thus beginning his journey to American Internet.
“We established JCupid, which joined forces with JDate,” recalls Lev. “In 2004, Cupid was sold to Spark Networks, which operates JDate. That was my first exit and I immediately started looking for my next project and remained in the United States. The next thing turned out to be KSolo.” KSolo, run by the Israeli developers of Cupid and headed by Lev in New York, is a site for karaoke singing and recording.
Lev says that his secret to success is not developing something that he thinks users want, but something that users need. The product does not have to be connected to the success of other sites or the entrepreneur’s personal background.
“I was no longer a bachelor when I began matchmaking on the Web and had no connection to karaoke when I founded KSolo, but it seemed to me like a necessary product. One does not always have to invent the wheel. One can take something that works well in the real world and adapt it for the Internet. This was the case with the two companies I founded,” he says.
“At KSolo, we signed an agreement with all the major copyright holders of the songs in America and share the revenues with them,” Lev adds, adding that in the Internet era, content has so far been considered the main thing.
“One has to understand that in the past two years, the user has become the focal point,” continues Lev, “and it is the users who control the content.”
Lev’s path to the Fox deal began like that of many Internet entrepreneurs, with a fund-raising campaign by private investors.
“The investors were American,” relates Lev. “It is easier to raise money in the U.S. It depends on the project, but usually Israelis find it harder to spend money. It is something in their blood. Israeli market evaluations are lower, because Israelis were burned more severely by the bursting of the high-tech bubble. Since the American Internet market was much more advanced, many companies had already had exits, while in Israel, the industry collapsed a moment before companies closed deals, and the sting of the previous experience affects investors’ decisions to this day.”
In the summer of 2006, about a year after KSolo went on the air, Lev received a telephone call from, Tom Andersen, one of Fox’s senior executives, who is also the president of MySpace. He had discovered a karaoke recording by a KSolo user on the user’s personal site at MySpace.
“The negotiations [with Fox] were quick and very serious,” recalls Lev. “For a few weeks I attended a great many meetings, at which [Fox representatives] explained to me exactly what they wanted. They exhibited a level of perseverance and determination I had not encountered before and did not waste any time, something critical to startups.”
Lev would not disclose how much he received for the company, but commented that the investors received a good return on their money. After the sale, Lev was appointed a senior vice president at Fox, where he continues to be responsible for KSolo’s operations.
The Jewish Vitual Library wrote in their article on MySpace´s Lev Nimrod´s (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Nimrod_Lev.html) connection to the Israeli military:
Ironically enough, it was war-not love-that prepared Lev for his career and reinforced his belief in promulgating the Jewish faith via Jewish marriages. Military service is compulsory in Israel-women serve two years and men three. Lev, however, opted to serve five: three years as a paratrooper in a combat unit and then two years in charge of an intelligence unit that focused on anti-terrorist tactics. Today, he is a captain in the reserves.
“When you walk 60 miles with 40 pounds on you, everything else looks easy,” he says. “I wish that young people didn’t have to go through this. At this age-after high school graduation-they should be thinking about chasing down dates not about chasing terrorists. But I know that until we find peace, everyone has to contribute to Israel’s safety. We’re defending Israel so Jews all over the world will have a place to feel safe. This is one of the reasons we need to do whatever we can to bring Jews together.”
Lev Nimrod
The Guardian on how Israel´s Foreign Office tries to promote Israel via MySpace:
Israel seeks friends through MySpace
By Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
The Guardian, Saturday 24 March 2007
A 58-year-old Jerusalem woman is not a typical MySpace user – the hugely popular social networking site is inhabited mostly by people at least 30 years younger.
But the profile she is reading is a profile with a difference: it represents the entire state of Israel. Officials hope that running a MySpace page dedicated to Israel will help improve relations with people from other countries, and increase awareness and communication with those under 35.
The idea belongs to David Saranga, a diplomat based at the Israeli consulate in New York. Mr Saranga said research had shown Israel’s image among the young was not good, and that by reaching out through one of the internet’s most popular sites he could repair some of the damage.
“We saw that we had a problem with the 18 to 35 age group. The reason is that this group doesn’t see Israel as relevant.We have to talk to them in their language, in platforms they are using, and the new media is one of the ways to do so,” he said.
The page is particularly targeted at young Americans, who make up a large proportion of MySpace users. Since Mr Saranga set up the page, “Israel” has gained 963 friends from around the world, including fictional characters such as TV secret agent Jack Bauer and Star Wars heroine Princess Leia, as well as, it is claimed, the Hollywood actors George Clooney and Leonardo Di Caprio.
The pages include pictures of Israeli cities, as well as music that invites the audience to question the cycle of violence and to “end this holy war”. Among Mr Saranga’s other initiatives are a blog called “isRealli” and an internet TV station.
Shawn Gold of MySpace
Article from Prison Planet.com on arch-Zionist Murdoch´s “cyber trojan horse”:
MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet Censorship
Media elite’s last gasp effort to save crumbling empire
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | March 16 2006
MySpace isn’t cool, it isn’t hip and it isn’t trendy. It represents a cyber trojan horse and the media elite’s last gasp effort to reclaim control of the Internet and sink it with a stranglehold of regulation, control and censorship.
Since Rupert Murdoch’s $580 Million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005, it has come from total obscurity to now being the 8th most visited website in the world, receiving half as many page hits as Google, despite the fact that on first appearance it looks like a 5-year-old’s picture scrap and scribble book.
MySpace is the new mobile phone. If you don’t have a MySpace account then you belong to some kind of culturally shunned underclass.
What most of the trendy wendy’s remain blissfully unaware of is the fact that MySpace is Rupert Murdoch’s battle axe for shaping a future Internet environment whereby electronic dissent, whether it be against corporations or government, will not tolerated and freedom of e-speech will cease to exist.
MySpace has been caught shutting down blogs critical of itself and other Murdoch owned companies. They even had the audacity to censor links to completely different websites when clicking through for MySpace. When 600 MySpace users complained, MySpace deleted the blog forum that the complaints were posted on. Taking their inspiration from Communist China, MySpace regularly uses blanket censorship to block out words like ‘God’.
Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch sounded the death knell for conventional forms of media in stating that the media elite were losing their monopoly to the rapid and free spread of new communication technologies. Murdoch stressed the need to regain control of these outlets in order to prevent the establishment media empire from crumbling.
MySpace is Rupert Murdoch’s trojan horse for destroying free speech on the Internet. It is a foundational keystone of the first wave of the state’s backlash to the damage that a free and open Internet has done to their organs of propaganda. By firstly making it cool, trendy and culturally elite for millions to flock to establishment controlled Internet backbones like MySpace, Murdoch is preparing the groundwork for the day when it will stop being voluntary and become mandatory to use government and corporate monopoly controlled Internet hubs.
The end game is a system similar to or worse than China, whereby no websites even mildly critical of the government will be authorized.
The Pentagon admitted that they would engage in psychological warfare and cyber attacks on ‘enemy’ Internet websites in an attempt to shut them down. The fact that the NSA surveillance program spied on 5,000 Americans tells us that the enemy is the alternative media and that it will be targeted for elimination. Google has been ordered to turn over information about its users by a judge to the US government.
The second wave of destroying freedom of speech online will simply attempt to price people out of using the conventional Internet and force people over to Internet 2, a state regulated hub where permission will need to be obtained directly from an FCC or government bureau to set up a website.
The original Internet will then be turned into a mass surveillance database and marketing tool. The Nation magazine reported, “Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets–corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers–would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.”
The original Internet will deliberately be subject to crash upon crash until it becomes a useless carcass of overpriced trash and its reputation will be defiled by the TV and media barons cashing in on the perfectly streamlined Internet 2, the free for all network that just requires you to thumbscan in order to log on! Those with a security grading below yellow on their national ID card will unfortunately be refused access. Websites that carry hate speech (ones that talk about government corruption) will be censored for the betterment of society.
For the aspiring dictator, the Internet is a dangerous tool that has been seized by the enemy. We have come a long way since 1969, when the ARPANET was created solely for US government use. The Internet is freedom’s best friend and the bane of control freaks. Its eradication is one of the short term goals of those that seek to centralize power and subjugate the world under a global surveillance panopticon prison.
Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace and its ceaseless promotion by the establishment media as the best thing since sliced bread is part of this movement. In saying all this we do encourage everyone to set up a MySpace account, but only if you’re going to use it to bash MySpace, Rupert Murdoch and copy and paste this article right at the top of the page! See how long it is before your account is terminated.
eBay
The Jewish boasting page www.jewishachievement.com writes on the Jewish first President of eBay, the Canadian-born Jeff Skoll:
Jeff Skoll did not create eBay, non-Jew Pierre Omidyar did in 1993. For Omidyar, born to French and Iranian parents, creating an on-line auction Web-site was a Labor Day weekend hobby project. For its first couple of years, it was simply a free Web-site Omidyar ran on his own home page along with several other of his Web page creations. During the first few months, he tried to recruit Skoll, a Jewish French-Canadian he met through friends, to become his partner. Skoll turned him down, choosing to remain at Stanford Business School.
In early 1996, Omidyar’s Internet service provider began charging him $250 a month to host the site. Omidyar was forced to start charging a fee, which he passed along to the site’s users based on the sale price of auction items. As the checks started rolling in Omidyar realized he needed help. Again, he approached Skoll. This time, after a few months of consulting for eBay, Skoll signed on as its first full time employee and President.
Jeff Skoll
Skoll grew up in Canada and showed early signs of being a driven entrepreneur. At twelve, he was selling Amway products door-to-door. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a 4.0 grade point average, he set up two high tech companies before moving to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford Business School. Compensating for Omidyar’s easy going ways and enjoyment of programming, Skoll was the driven leader who planned the business and made things happen. He hired key people, established much of the culture, and constantly pushed to build the business.
The result is the number one auction Web site in the world. It grossed $3.9 billion in 2004, netted $936 million and was worth $53 billion by mid 2005, all of which made both Omidyar and Skoll very wealthy. Skoll has since left eBay and now devotes the bulk of his time to philanthropic activities, particularly his Skoll Foundation to which he has donated $250 million. The Foundation supports social entrepreneurs working to effect lasting positive social changes worldwide. In 2003, Skoll won recognition from Business Week magazine as “one of the most innovative philanthropists of the past decade”
Ed Skoll also interacts with fellow Jewish Internet entrepreneurs. We have named the Israel-loving financier and Board member of Facebook, Peter Thiel, in our section on that company.
Thiel togeher with the Ukrainan Jew Max Rafael Levchin founded PayPal. The company was then bought by eBay. In an excerpt from “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0”, by Sarah Lacy, (see:http://www.metroactive.com/metro/06.11.08/cover-supermen-0824.html ), we can see how Skoll “became friends with the PayPal crew” of Jews and even entered the movie business:
The PayPal mafia even had Hollywood success. Jeff Skoll was one of the first eBay executives who became friends with the PayPal crew when eBay bought the company in 2002. He started up Participant Productions on a lark, and it has been one of the most profitable productions companies in Hollywood. Among its first four films were Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, North Country, and An Inconvenient Truth. Skoll’s success convinced Max and Peter to start dabbling in Hollywood, bankrolling the 2006 indie flick Thank You for Smoking, along with David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer.
While Sacks continued to play the Hollywood game, he also launched a new social networking site for families, called Geni.com. It allows people to fill out their family trees and link them to the family trees of spouses and in-laws. Anyone on the tree can add to the tree, the idea being that over time you discover people you’re related to that you didn’t know. It’s a bold idea, one of the first Web 2.0 start-ups aimed squarely at families. Peter Thiel, naturally, backed it early on. And in Geni’s first venture capital round with Charles River Ventures, it got nosebleed $100 million valuation. The CRV partner who wrote the check was George Zachary, Skoll’s early partner in Participant Productions and a friend of Max and Peter’s. By 2006, the PayPal mafia was an incestuous world where, for now, everyone seemed to be making lots of money.
Just to clarify both David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer, and George Zachary, “Skoll’s early partner in Participant Productions and a friend of Max and Peter’s”, are Jewish.
Another Jew in Skoll´s present entourage is Larry Brilliant who we detail more in our section on Google where he for 3 years was responsible for Google´s philanthropic arm Google.org. In 2009 Brilliant joined a new organisation set up by Jeff Skoll. But Dr. Brilliant also said he would remain as an advisor to Google.
Skoll was President of eBay until 1998 when he became Vice President, Strategic Planning and Analysis, until back problems necessitated his departure from full-time employment at the company. Once eBay’s second largest stockholder (behind only Omidyar) he subsequently cashed out a portion of his company holdings, yielding him around $2 billion.
Jeff Skoll of eBay
Yossi Vardi – “Israeli technology guru”
Article from European Jewish Congress, Thursday, May 22, 2008:
Yossi Vardi: Israel’s ’Mr. Tech’
By Jennifer L. Schenker
It’s May 15, and Israeli technology guru Yossi Vardi is moderating a session on the future of the Internet at a conference in Jerusalem. On stage with the fatherly 65-year-old is a who’s who of tech and media bigwigs, including Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin, Yahoo ! (YHOO) President Susan Decker, and News Corp. (NWS) Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch.
Vardi (right in the above photo) isn’t the least bit cowed by their eminence. In his irrepressible manner, he calls out to the crowd : “How many Israeli entrepreneurs in the audience want to do business with Yahoo ?” He then tries to get Decker to give out her personal e-mail address. (She declines.) Vardi settles for announcing the e-mail of Yahoo’s head of European operations to the scores of entrepreneurs who have raised their hands.
Undoubtedly the most prominent and connected tech entrepreneur in Israel, Vardi makes no bones about his objectives. The point of moderating the tech panel, he says later with a laugh, was to “shamelessly promote Israel’s high-tech sector.” The same evening, he tries to convince Brin to do more business in Israel by dragging the Google co-founder and his parents to a dilapidated warehouse in the suburbs of Tel Aviv to introduce them to 300 Israeli “garage geeks” who tinker there.
Now this goodwill ambassador-long known for his connections in Silicon Valley-has been tapped by the Israeli government to help deepen ties with Europe. Vardi was recently named co-chairman-alongside Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of German media company Axel Springer (SPRGN)-of a group called the EU-Israel Business Dialogue. Its aim is to foster business relations between Israel and Europe through events such as the upcoming Israel Innovation Day in Germany on June 16.
Making Deals, Earning Respect
Although the panel’s work is just getting under way, Europe’s big tech companies have already been eyeing Israeli innovation for some time. In March, a France Telecom (FTE) subsidiary spent $21.4 million for a startup called Orca Interactive, based in Ra’anana, near Tel Aviv, that develops Internet TV software and applications. Germany’s Deutsche Telekom (DT) has opened a research and development laboratory at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University focused on network security. And Britain’s BT Group (BT) is “actively scouting for Israeli technologies to use either ourselves or for our customers,” says Gary Shainberg, BT’s vice-president for technology and innovation support.
Such deals are welcome news to Vardi, who founded his first technology startup in 1969 and has gone on to be involved in more than 60 Israeli tech ventures. He has taken seven companies public and sold many others-the most famous of which was ICQ, the first Internet instant-messaging company, which was acquired by AOL (TWX) for more than $400 million.
But more than his financial success, what has turned the avuncular Vardi into Israel’s Mr. Tech is relentless networking, his passionate belief in the cause, and generosity with his time and money. Known for his love of gadgets and mischievous sense of humor, Vardi has plowed his gains from ICQ and other successes back into startups, serving as angel investor and mentor to scores of young Israelis. He now counts more than 40 companies in his investment portfolio, and spends much of his time traveling around the world to promote these and other Israeli companies at business events.
That commitment and kindness has earned Vardi legions of admirers, including Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, who calls him Israel’s “best ambassador” to the world of science and technology. Vardi isn’t in it for the money, Peres insists. “He is after the science itself. He really and sincerely wakes up in the morning, opens his eyes, and asks, ’God, what can I discover of your secrets today ?’ And once he has it, he will relate it to others.”
Groundbreaking Generosity
There’s another motivation as well, says Vardi, who had a long civil service career in Israel : what he calls modern day Zionism. “I belong to the generation that witnessed the creation of the state,” Vardi says. “I still remember the dancing in the streets on the 29th of November, 1947, so for me, what I am doing, is a current manifestation of pioneering the building of the state of Israel.”
At times, Vardi may be too much of a soft touch. He says he hates to read business plans and instead goes with his gut-sometimes even committing to investments over the phone if he believes in the entrepreneur making the pitch. “My wife, Thalma, who keeps me connected to the ground, tells me it doesn’t make sense that every kid with shining eyes walks away from a meeting with me with a check,” says Vardi. “But I tell her if I lose the money at least it goes to nice people and allows them to follow their dreams. Who wants to give money to jerks?”
Thanks in part to his involvement, high tech now represents a vibrant portion of Israel’s economy (BusinessWeek.com, 5/13/08). But the domestic market is so small that Israeli tech companies have to grow their businesses quickly in the U.S. and Europe. Nobody can open doors abroad like Vardi, say entrepreneurs and executives.
“Yossi is a super-node,” says BT’s Shainberg. “He connects people and companies from around the world to leverage the world-beating technology innovation in Israel.” With the help of Vardi and the Israeli Trade & Industry Assn., Shainberg is bringing a group of Israeli tech entrepreneurs to London on June 10-11 to meet with executives from the British phone company and its partners.
Forging Relationships
Indeed, Vardi’s web of connections spreads throughout the Continent. He has, for instance, a long-standing relationship with German publishing company Hubert Burda Media, acting as an informal adviser on digital strategies. A few years back, he helped the company set up a conference called Cool Companies in the Hot Desert that brought a group of German tech entrepreneurs to Israel. “Yossi is a connector, a sharer, a giver, a storyteller,” says Stephanie Czerny, Burda’s managing director in charge of R&D, marketing, and communication.
The success of the event led Vardi and Burda CEO Hubert Burda (left in the photo) to launch what has quickly become one of Europe’s most important technology conferences, known as Digital, Life, Design, or DLD. The annual event now draws 1,000 attendees every January, and this year Vardi brought 150 Israeli Internet entrepreneurs along with him to the conference to introduce them to potential investors and business partners.
Vardi thrives on forging those sorts of links. “Yossi has an amazing capability and will to connect people,” says Tal Keinan, CEO of an Israeli startup called SemantiNet, one of the companies in Vardi’s portfolio. “This is priceless for a startup.”
Keinan found that out firsthand when Vardi invited him to a private dinner in London in April. Held in the BT Tower, the exclusive event included senior executives from Apple (AAPL), Yahoo, Hutchison Europe, and Google, as well as partners from investment firms such as Accel Partners and Hasso Plattner Ventures. As if that wasn’t enough, a few days later back in Israel, Vardi introduced Keinan to Dell (DELL) founder and CEO Michael Dell.
For all his brokering of deals and relationships, Vardi isn’t impressed by big names and isn’t in it just for the money. “It is about building things, about having fun, about exploring new boundaries, and crossing boundaries,” says Uri Admon, CEO of an Israeli startup called Dyuna, another company in Vardi’s portfolio. “He is an inspiration to us all.”
Schenker is a BusinessWeek correspondent in Paris.
Other Jewish actors
In August 2007 the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit featured the forum “Social Networking 3.0”. The composition of the panel at this forum was very illustrative:
Moderator Charlene Li was joined by Travis Katz, senior Vice President and General Manager of MySpace International; Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook; Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of Demand Media and former MySpace Executive; Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning; and Karl Jacob, CEO of Wallop.
The only non-Jew in this panel was Bianchini, the rest – Katz, Moskovitz, Rosenblatt and Karl Jacob – were are all from the tribe of the “chosen people”, as they call themselves. This clearly illustrates the Jewish overrepresentation in this field.
We will here reproduce some Jewish articles on the subject of Jews and Internet.
Networking meeting. From the left; Travis Katz, Dustin Moskovitz, Richard Rosenblatt,
Gina Bianchini, Karl Jacob.
Richard Rosenblatt |
 Karl Jacob |
 Travis Katz |
Dustin Moskovitz |
The Jewish boast-page www.jewishachievement.com writes on the subject:
(Note that the passage below that Google´s Larry Page is a “non-Jew” is utter nonsense, as illustrated by quotes from Jewish sources in our section on Google.)
Jews as High Technology Entrepreneurs and Managers
Jews have traditionally been seen as prominent in such industries as finance, merchandising, apparel, textiles, entertainment, media, and publishing. And in most of them, Jews were true pioneers. They played leading roles as those industries emerged on the scene.
Their disproportionate importance to the contemporary world of 24/7 competitive high technology is less well known, but they have flourished there as well. It plays to their strengths. High technology demands a solid grounding in the underlying science or engineering and that typically calls for college, and sometimes a post graduate education. Demographically, Jews are better educated than their peers. An earlier chapter pointed out the high levels of Jewish enrollment at leading public and private universities.
The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 goes further. It points out that:
“More than half of all Jewish Adults (55%) received a college degree and a quarter (25%) earned a graduate degree.” “The Comparable figures for the total U.S. population are 29% and 6%.” As a result,
“More than 60% of all employed Jews are in one of the three highest status job categories: professional or technical (41%), management and executive (13%) and business and finance (7%).” “In contrast, 46% of all Americans work in these three high status areas, 29% in professional or technical jobs, 12% in management and executive positions and 5% in business and finance.”
Jews also tend to be disproportionately entrepreneurial, working where they will succeed or fail based on their own efforts. Andrew Grove’s decision to stop writing, and instead to pursue science, illustrates the point. Judgments about writers are often subjective while those about science are much less so. Grove wanted to work in a field where he would be judged on his own performance. He chose chemistry and got his Ph.D. After several years working with the best and brightest at Fairchild Semiconductor, he left to become one of the three founders of Intel.
Technology is a high risk meritocracy. While even the most talented people sometimes fail, and fortune can obliterate the most brilliant of plans; technology is not political. Relationships and initial funding will carry a venture only so far. Ultimately it must succeed or fail on its own merits in a volatile, highly competitive arena. Such risky opportunities can be pursued in hospitable climates, such as the United States, and in such environments, Jewish entrepreneurs have done well. They:
- Created the world’s largest and most valuable personal computer company; (Michael Dell, Dell Computers)
- Co-founded the world’s most successful search engine; (Sergy Brin, Google)
- Head the world’s largest software company; (Steve Ballmer, Microsoft)
- Co-founded and head the world’s second largest software company; (Larry Ellison, Oracle)
- Co-founded, led and served as Chairman of the dominant microprocessor and memory chip company whose products drive most of today’s personal computers; (Andrew Grove, Intel)
- Created the first “killer application” software which ignited demand for personal computers; (Mitch Kapor, Lotus 123)
- Served as Number 1 or 2 person in three of the world’s four most valuable Internet companies according to a May 2004 Fortune study (Terry Semmel at Yahoo, Jeff Skoll at e-Bay and Barry Diller at IAC)
- Co-founded and head the communications protocol/chip company whose technology is the market leader in U.S. cell phones and is likely to be the world leader as the next generation cell phone technology (3G) is adopted worldwide. (Irwin Jacobs, Qualcomm).
And that is only the barest overview:
Dell: Michael Dell and Larry Ellison (of Oracle) share the distinction of being two of the most successful college dropouts in history. (Non-Jew Bill Gates is a third.) Dell quit the University of Texas in 1985 when he was 19 years old to start Dell Computer Corporation with a $1,000 stake. His idea was to “cut out the middleman” by selling personal computers (PCs) directly to customers.
Dell’s combination of custom built computers, excellent product quality, superb customer service, outstanding production efficiency, and low prices created the world’s largest computer manufacturing company. In achieving that distinction, he took on IBM, Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, and many other PC makers, most of them much bigger and better financed than Dell.
He is emblematic of the creative, determined nature of successful entrepreneurs. In the process, he made his company one of the most valuable in the world. In 1992, Dell became the youngest CEO in history to earn a spot on the Fortune 500 when his Company had been in existence for only eight years. With fiscal year 2005 sales of $53 billion, Dell has humbled most competitors. Despite the challenges of rapid growth and competitive success, Dell and its founder are consistently counted as among America’s most respected.
The success has earned 40 year old Dell a fortune, sufficient, till his most recent birthday, to consistently place him among Fortune’s “40 under 40.” These are all young entrepreneurs, athletes and entertainers who have achieved stellar success before reaching age 40. With his wife, Dell has created the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, endowing it with more than $1 billion. Its focus is the health, education, safety, care and development of children. Among its recent commitments was $130 million to help boost high school graduation and college attendance rates in Texas.
Google: Sergy Brin is the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who left the Soviet Union in 1979 to escape persecution. Sergy was six at the time. Mathematically inclined, he earned a computer science degree from University of Maryland before entering Stanford as a postgraduate student. There he met non-Jew, Larry Page, also studying for his doctorate. Together, they developed a search engine – called BackRub before they renamed it Google.
They dropped out of Stanford, rounded up $1 million from friends, family and angel venture investors and on September 7, 1998, launched Google. Less than ten years old, it is the most popular search engine on the Web with more than eighty-two million users each month accessing more than eight billion Web site pages (twice the comparable 2004 figure). It employs more than 4,000 people and has had a spectacular run up in its stock price to a value of roughly $80 billion in mid 2005.
Microsoft: Steve Ballmer did not found Microsoft. Non-Jews Bill Gates and Paul Allen did. They started the Company in 1976, five years after they began programming together while attending Lakeside High School in Seattle where they had access to the school’s computer. Gates went off to Harvard where he and Ballmer became good friends. Ballmer was a bright Jewish kid from Detroit who scored a perfect 800 on his math SATs and who took it upon himself to “socialize” Gates at Harvard – until Gates dropped out to start Microsoft. About the same time, Paul Allen dropped out of Washington State and together Gates and Allen launched the Company.
Gates tried to convince Ballmer to drop out as well, but instead, Ballmer stayed in school, going on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard in 1977. He worked for Proctor and Gamble for two years and then entered Stanford Business School. Perhaps just to “fit in,” he then dropped out of Stanford Business School in 1980 after Gates had made yet one more appeal for him to join Microsoft. Ballmer was the Company’s twenty-fourth employee.
Within three years Paul Allen was gone, the result of a bout with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Ballmer served first as the Company’s financial disciplinarian and later became the number two guy, holding down every senior job in the Company before being named President in 1998 and CEO in 2000. Known for his determination and salesmanship, Ballmer has been vital to Microsoft’s success.
Oracle: Larry Ellison is a University of Chicago dropout. He was one of the three (later four) partners who founded Oracle Corporation in 1977. Ellison, the leader, read an IBM article about a new kind of software termed a “relational database.” Then commonly acknowledged as a revolutionary new way to build a database, no one, not even at IBM, thought it was commercially viable. Ellison disagreed and with $2,000, the partners began developing the software, using cash generated from consulting projects to augment the $2,000.
Of the four founders, two later left the company and one died. But from the start, it was Ellison that was, and still is, the driving force behind Oracle. “Relentless,” “determined,” and “ruthless” are among terms commonly used to describe him. He has been schooled in Japanese approaches to business where anything less than 100 percent market share is not enough.
His strong ego is characterized by the titles of two books about him. The first is titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison.” It is the first line of an old Silicon Valley joke for which the punch line is “God does not think he is Larry Ellison.” The second book is Everyone Else Must Fail, for which the preamble is “It is not good enough that I should succeed.”
Ellison was born to an unmarried Jewish teenage mother and an Italian-American air force pilot father, but he grew up with an aunt, and an uncle who constantly put young Larry down saying he would never amount to anything. Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990, the 2004 Forbes’ 400 lists Ellison as the world’s ninth wealthiest person.
Ellison has devoted roughly half a billion dollars to charities, particularly a medical foundation focused mostly on infectious diseases in the third world and diseases of aging. In mid 2005, he also pledged $115 million to Harvard University.
Intel: As noted in the Andrew Grove bio, Intel was formed in 1968 by non-Jews Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who recruited Grove to be their co-founder and third employee. Their established reputations and ability to raise the needed $2.5 million from venture capitalist Arthur Rock financed the Company, Noyce headed up sales and Marketing, Moore R&D, while Grove headed manufacturing and product development. Grove disciplined the organization to set and reach goals and he made the critical decisions, such committing Intel to the microprocessors which made Intel the huge success it is.
Lotus: Mitch Kapor did not invent the spreadsheet, but his software program, Lotus 123, was the first application to spawn huge demand for personal computers. Visicalc, an earlier spreadsheet program created by Jew Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1982, was available on several early computers including the Apple II a few years before Lotus 123 arrived. But Lotus 123 had many more features, was easier to use, and had far better graphics. It provided the compelling reason for consumers to buy personal computers and demand was so strong, Lotus grossed $53 million in its first year and $156 million by 1984. Kapor went on to create other major software programs including Lotus Agenda.
eBay: Jeff Skoll did not create eBay, non-Jew Pierre Omidyar did in 1993. For Omidyar, born to French and Iranian parents, creating an on-line auction Web-site was a Labor Day weekend hobby project. For its first couple of years, it was simply a free Web-site Omidyar ran on his own home page along with several other of his Web page creations. During the first few months, he tried to recruit Skoll, a Jewish French-Canadian he met through friends, to become his partner. Skoll turned him down, choosing to remain at Stanford Business School.
In early 1996, Omidyar’s Internet service provider began charging him $250 a month to host the site. Omidyar was forced to start charging a fee, which he passed along to the site’s users based on the sale price of auction items. As the checks started rolling in Omidyar realized he needed help. Again, he approached Skoll. This time, after a few months of consulting for eBay, Skoll signed on as its first full time employee and President.
Skoll grew up in Canada and showed early signs of being a driven entrepreneur. At twelve, he was selling Amway products door-to-door. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a 4.0 grade point average, he set up two high tech companies before moving to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford Business School. Compensating for Omidyar’s easy going ways and enjoyment of programming, Skoll was the driven leader who planned the business and made things happen. He hired key people, established much of the culture, and constantly pushed to build the business.
The result is the number one auction Web site in the world. It grossed $3.9 billion in 2004, netted $936 million and was worth $53 billion by mid 2005, all of which made both Omidyar and Skoll very wealthy. Skoll has since left eBay and now devotes the bulk of his time to philanthropic activities, particularly his Skoll Foundation to which he has donated $250 million. The Foundation supports social entrepreneurs working to effect lasting positive social changes worldwide. In 2003, Skoll won recognition from Business Week magazine as “one of the most innovative philanthropists of the past decade”
InterActive Corp (IAC): Barry Diller has made a career of corporate transformations. He started in the mail room at the William Morris Agency in his early 20s, and at age 24, moved to ABC-TV. Within three years, he was Vice President of Feature Films and Program Development. In that job he inaugurated ABC’s Movie of the Week, the most popular movie series in television history. At ABC Diller pioneered highly profitable “made-for-television” films which focused on social issues such as homosexuality, the Vietnam War and drugs.
In 1974, following that success (and still only 32), he was named President of Paramount Pictures. At Paramount, he oversaw creation of the hit television series: Cheers, Taxi, and Laverne and Shirley, and hit movies including: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Ten years later he moved to Twentieth Century-FOX where in 1985, after Rupert Murdoch took over, he launched Fox as the fourth television network. By 1990, Diller had Fox producing five nights of prime time television with such popular shows as: The Simpsons, Married With Children, Cops and America’s Most Wanted.
Diller quit Fox to purchase a stake in QVC, the cable shopping network, and from there he launched an unsuccessful bid to take over Paramount. Sumner Redstone’s Viacom beat him out. Shortly thereafter, in 1995, non-Jew John Malone recruited Diller to leave QVC, invest in and run Liberty Media’s Silver King Communications, which was broadcasting the Home Shopping Network. Diller later merged Home Shopping into Silver King.
Through a blinding series of name changes, strategic redirections and $8 billion worth of mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and investments in more than 45 companies, Diller created what is now called Interactive Corp (IAC), the fifth major Internet Company, (behind Google, Amazon, e-Bay, and Yahoo). Little known to the general public, IAC controls such prominent Internet names as: Expedia, Hotels.com, Lending Tree, Hotwire.com, Evite, Citysearch and Ticketmaster.
Over the years, Diller has served as a director of Coca Cola and the Washington Post, Trustee of New York University, member of the Executive Board for Medical Sciences at UCLA, member of the Board of Councilors of USC’s School of Cinema-Television and a member of the Board of the Museum of Television and Radio.
Yahoo: Terry Semel did not create Yahoo. Non-Jews Jerry Yang and David Filo did in 1994, as a hobby, while pursuing their electrical engineering PhD’s at Stanford. In those halcyon, “early bubble” days, Yahoo went public within two years. It was then, and still is today, regarded as one of the major Internet successes of all time, but along the way, it hit a bump in the road. In 2001, Yahoo lost $93 million on revenues of $717 million. The stock tanked and new talent was needed to avert a melt down.
That is when Terry Semel arrived. Semel had 24 years at Warner Brothers where he had been instrumental in building the Company from $1 billion to $11 billion in annual revenues. Semel quickly pushed Yahoo’s marketing, consumers’ services and acquisitions and by 2003, he had turned the company around. In 2004, Yahoo made $1.6 billion under his leadership.
Qualcomm: Irwin Jacobs is listed as one of seven Qualcomm founders, but by any measure, he has been the “essential man” from Qualcomm’s 1985 inception till now.
Qualcomm created and controls Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), a major wireless telecommunications technology. It is the most widely used wireless calling technology in the United States, (47 percent market share) used by such carriers as Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint. Around the world, 212 million wireless phones already utilize Qualcomm technology and as 3G, the next generation of wireless, is deployed, Qualcomm is expected to become the international market leader as well.
Jacobs grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was a mediocre musician, but an excellent student earning a bachelors degree from Cornell and a Masters and a Doctor of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He taught at MIT and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 1959 to 1972.
While teaching, he wrote a still used college text, Principles of Communications Engineering, and in 1969, co-founded LINKABIT, a company he describes as his initial move towards becoming an “academic dropout.” That finally happened in 1972 when he became LINKABIT’s full time President and Chairman. The Company pioneered satellite TV receiver technology (VideoCipher) and was the first to commercially introduce Time Division Multiplex Access (TDMA), the predecessor technology to CDMA. Jacobs built LINKABIT to 1,400 employees, before merging it with M/A-COM and he served on that Board until 1985.
Initially, Qualcomm did research and development and some manufacturing for wireless companies while it built the largest satellite-based messaging service used by trucking companies to manage their fleets. That service was quickly overshadowed, however, by CDMA. By 2004, CDMA was generating over $5 billion in annual revenues.
All of this has made Jacobs (and his fellow founders) quite wealthy. Jacobs has responded with major philanthropy. He and his wife have given $110 million to the San Diego Symphony (hearkening back to his days as a mediocre musician), another $110 million went to the UCSD to “support the other faculty that are currently doing the teaching,” $7 million went to the Salk Institute, and millions more has gone to support the San Diego Food Bank and historic New Bedford. Both he, and fellow Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi now have schools of engineering named after them, Jacobs at UCSD and Viterbi and the University of Southern California.
RealNetworks: Ron Glaser takes credit for creating the first technology to “stream” audio, video, and other digital content, such as music and games, to computers. He founded RealNetworks in 1994 to capitalize on the technology.
Fresh out of Yale with degrees in economics and computer sciences, Glaser joined Microsoft in 1983 where he rose, over his ten years there, to become Vice President of Multimedia and Consumer Systems. He left Microsoft in 1994 and shortly thereafter, says he downloaded Mosaic, an early version of the Netscape Internet browser. He immediately saw the potential to augment the browser with “streaming.” He founded RealNetworks and was soon able to take it public. It became a hot Internet stock and, for a time, Glaser was a billionaire.
Today, following the bursting of the Internet bubble and heightened competition with Microsoft’s Media Player and Apple’s Quicktime, RealNetworks continues to post operating losses and it is taking on Microsoft in court. Like earlier Federal and state lawsuits against Microsoft, Glaser’s company claims Microsoft competes unfairly by bundling its Mediaplayer into its software. Win or lose, RealNetworks has sufficient cash to finance itself for some time and thus remain a major Internet force, particularly as the downloading of music and games becomes ever more prolific. If RealNetworks succeeds, Glaser will rejoin the ranks of billionaires who hit it big with their Internet technology innovations.
Broadcast.com & HDNet: Mark Cuban grew up poor, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants in blue collar Pittsburgh. He was a bright student who was also considered something of a hustler with his native selling ability (selling garbage bags, greeting cards and magazines, all door-to-door, from the time he was 12.) At the University of Indiana he started a chain letter and gave disco dancing lessons to pay for school.
After graduating in 1983 he started a computer consulting firm, MicroSolutions, though he neither owned, nor knew much about, computers. Self-taught by having to learn to perform on the promises he made to customers, he built the Company to revenues of $30 million a year before selling it to Compuserve. He made himself wealthy in the process.
He then “kicked back” for a few years, before returning in 1995, with partner Todd R. Wagner (not Jewish), to create Broadcast.com. It pioneered radio and television broadcasting over the Internet. Cuban and Wagner soon took it public and, in 1999, sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. Cuban and Wagner were billionaires.
His attention then shifted to his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Cuban is a brash, avid, courtside presence whose outbursts have cost him an estimated $1 million in fines. At the same time, his savvy marketing and recruiting of top talent has converted the Mavericks from a perennial loser to a contender.
Cuban also launched HDNet, a high definition television broadcast network available on satellite, cable, and selected over the air high definition broadcast stations. He and Wagner also purchased Landmark theaters, a large U.S. chain of “art-house” movie theaters which will air the high definition movies he is producing and the films he has contracted six major studios to convert from film to digital.
Measures of entrepreneurial success
One measure of entrepreneurial success is provided by the Fortune “40 Under 40” annual list of the wealthiest young Americans, nearly all of them self made. Though entrepreneurial success is not simply about wealth, it is one scorecard. The Fortune’s 2004 list is included as Exhibit 16a. While it includes thirteen athletes and entertainers, the remaining twenty-seven are successful young entrepreneurs, mostly from high technology companies they started or led. Of the twenty-seven, at least six are Jewish. Three of them are among the top five and five of them among the top ten. In order, the six include: #1 Michael Dell, #3 Jeff Skoll, #5 Sergey Brin, #9 Dan Snyder, #10, Marc Benioff, and #17 Jerry Greenberg. Statistically, at two percent of the U.S. population, Jews would be lucky if even one of the twenty-seven was Jewish. At 22 percent, the result is ten times what one would expect.
The Forbes 400 corroborates the Fortune list. (Exhibit 16b) Of the year 2004 ranking, at least 25 percent of the “400” are Jewish. And like the Fortune “40 Under 40,” many of them made their wealth as entrepreneurs who started successful businesses. Prominent among the first twenty-five are #9 Michael Dell, #10 Lawrence Ellison, and #11 Steven Balmer. As with the Fortune 40, the performance defies expectations. We would expect perhaps eight Jews among the 400, the actual figure (at least 102) is twelve times that.
And another Jewish article, this time from http://emergentobserver.blogspot.com/2009/03/omg-jewish-history-of-internet.html:
OMG, A Jewish History of the Internet
Did you know that the internet is Jewish? Yeah…Moses got the Torah from HaShem on Mt. Sinai and HaShem told Moses that his brother Aaron and his descendants would be Kohenim forever. Now a “Kohen” is a priest and the story of the internet involves a Jewish priest, a Jewish painter, a Jewish Scotsman and a Jewish sugar merchant living high in the mountains…well sort of…
In 1972, at the International Computer Communication Conference, Robert Kahn (a kohen) was able to connect 40 different computers revealing his work to the public for the first time. Just three years later David Farber (whose Yiddish family name means “painter”) worked to create a primitive kind of email system. Within the next twenty years the internet that we now know and love was born. In 2003 MySpace was launched and by 2006 it had become the largest social networking site in the United States. MySpace added a new dimension to how we communicate and share information with our friends, family and even religious communities. The website was co-founded by Tom Anderson. Although Tom’s last name reflects his father’s Scottish heritage, he and his mother are Jewish and he was raised in a messianic Jewish household. At the age of 14 Tom was a computer hacker working his mischief under the tag name Lord Flathead (not a Jewish name). He lead a team of hackers that were able to brake in to Chase Manhattan Bank computers, he tampered with banking records and left a message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would wipeout the records. He must have been praying because he was never charged with the crime 🙂 The website Tom would later become famous for inspired a 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg (a Jewish name meaning “sugar mountain”) to create another social networking site called Facebook. Things are looking sweeter then a pile of sugar for Zuckerberg because Facebook has made him over a billion dollars and more people can be found on his networking site then in the entire country of Japan.
…So we see that many key players in the field of computer technologies are our fellow tribesmen. The internet itself has even been compared to the Talmud…layers upon layers of commentary dealing with issues from personal hygiene to oven construction. However the internet is only truly comparable to the Talmud if it’s dialogue eventually returns to G-dly matters. The Talmud finds a way to elevate even mundane and seemingly secular matters to a level of Torah. We should do the same with our technologies, only then do they become truly Jewish.
And finally yet another Jewish boasting article on the same topic (from http://kupe.joeuser.com/article/158970/Jews_On_The_Internet):
Jews On The Internet
By Larry Kuperman
July 29, 2007
The question of how many Jews there are begs the definition of “What is a Jew?” and also “Who is a Jew?” Questions that have been asked many a time…..mostly by other Jews. Being a Secular Jew myself, I like the most liberal, inclusive definition that includes….well ME. The biggest number that you will see is about 18 million Jews. This works out to something like 1/4 of one per cent of the world’s population. So you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our numbers.
Not so, bubbala. (A term of endearment, darling. Can you feel me virtually pinching your cheek? In a nice way.) The impact of Jews far outweighs their numbers. Lets look at “Who’s A Yid?”
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google. Larry Page’s mom, Gloria Page, is Jewish. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, to Jewish parents, Michael and Eugenia, who fled to America for religious freedom.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard University. It was originally going to be limited to Harvard students, but expanded quickly. Zuckerberg saw the potential in the site and sought capital. He turned to Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal and, not-so-coincidentally, also Jewish. Facebook is often rumored to be up for sale. How much is Facebook worth? Let me refer that to Mr. Thiel: “Facebook’s internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015.” Founder Mark Zuckerberg is 23, or as we like to say, 10 years past his Bar Mitzvah.
Robert Kevin Rose is, comparatively, an old man at age 30. He is best known for founding Digg.com. Robert lost his job during the burst of the Dot Com bubble, ended up working as a production assistant on the show The Screen Savers He began appearing on air and stepped in as host after Leo Laporte left TechTV. On November 1, 2004, he started a site that combined social bookmarking, blogging, RSS into arguably the premier tech news site. Today Digg is rated among the 100 most popular sites on the web.
Scott Blum has been referred to as the “Sam Walton of e-commerce.” Leaving a successful career as a shoe salesman as a youth, he founded Microbanks, a company that sold add-on memory modules for Macintosh computers. Before his 21st birthday, he sold Microbanks to Sentron Technology in San Diego for $2.5 million in cash. He would then co-found Pinnacle Micro with his father. Leaving there under a cloud of dubious accounting practices (he paid no penalty and admitted no guilt) he would go on to found Buy.com. He left before went public, returned to take it back private and it is now his baby.
RealNetworks is not the most beloved company in the world, nor is Real Player a favorite product. But there is no question that CEO and Founder Rob Glaser has been influential. When he founded Real Networks in 1994, at age 31, he was already a millionaire from his days at Microsoft. He has had a major impact on the Internet.
Certainly also worth mentioning are Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, whose mother is Jewish; Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York to a Jewish mother and raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle in Chicago; and Phillipe Kahn, founder of Borland.
What would the Internet be like with Google, PayPal, Facebook, Digg.com, Buy.com? It would be very, very different.
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